MCU Maximoff Oneshots Series
by EssayOfThoughts
Summary: A long and on-going series of assorted oneshots regarding the Maximoff Twins as portrayed in the MCU films. Some will be sticking largely to canon, others will be AU or crossover. Please see inside for details.
1. Introduction

This is a wide variety of Oneshots about the MCU Maximoff twins about just about anything. They vary from canon-based to canon-twisty to outright AU and Crossover fics, but all will focus on the Maximoff twins as they are in the MCU, and n their relationship, relationships, interactions, complexities, etc. As each chapter will be AU (or crossover) in a different way, I'm not marking this as a crossover until I'm able to mark each individual crossover that occurs in this. Until then each fic entry in this series will be prefaced marking the differences, the crossover and/or the premise.

As this is a collection of Oneshots this will not contain the various longer fics you'll find on my page - the Memento Mori series, The Cradle of Life and Like Home. I do have many ideas for the twins however, both longfic and Oneshot-wise, so this should keep updated intermittently forever - keep an eye out!

Some of the fics here will be prefaced with "Prompt". These are from prompts sent into my tumblr (you can find the link on my main page), and I'm pretty much always open to taking prompts - just send in your idea, prefaced with "Prompt:" and I'll see what I can do. If I can't see a way to do the prompt I will answer to explain why and offer possible alternatives if I can think of any. I do love writing the twins, so if I can work with an asker to find a fic idea that works from all angles I'll generally try to.

 **Notes:**

At present I have around 90-odd fics that I mean to upload to here, but I also have a lot of Maximoff WIPs, both Promptfic and Plot Bunny. You'll find these listed below, and I'll try to update this first chapter so you can see when I get ones done.

 **Promptfic WIPs In Order To Be Completed:**

\- Loki'verse, Wanda has a child by Loki. [Plotting done, some writing done]  
\- Lorna'verse, Bucky and Lorna talking.

 **Assorted Fic WIPs of my own, some may end up in this series, others will be multichapter, to be completed:**

\- _Date Night_ \- Post AOU, Pietro Lives. Wanda getting ready for a date. Oneshot.  
\- _The Soft Light of Gas Lanterns_ \- Pietro brought back via, specifically, TAHITI Protocol and the fallout thereof. Will be different to the Oneshot _Mine, My Soul_ in multiple ways. Oneshot.  
\- _My Very Breath_ \- Soulmate AU in which you have the first words your soulmate will say to you on your arm in their handwriting. Wanda is Pietro's soulmate (platonically), but someone unknown is Wanda's. Almost certainly multi-chapter, or possibly a very long numeralled oneshot.  
\- _An Agony of Seconds_ \- AOU-DoFP AU. In which Peter and his little sister are replaced by the AOU Maximoff twins. I've figured out how I might be able to work in Vision. At least one multi-chapter fic, probably going to be a series at this point.  
\- _A Song of Scarlet, A Winter of Wolves_ \- Pseudo-medieval fantasy, complete with magic. Definitely multi-chapter, name may change.

I'm also working on a Oneshot sequel to _Unwanted Experiments_ and also a multi-chapter Gothic Romance Wanda/Vision fic. Neither have titles yet.


	2. Fic 1 - To Share A Soul

**To Share A Soul**

 **Summary:** When you have lived your whole life with only one other you trust, one who is your twin, who might well be half of you, would you not start to share a soul?

 **Notes:** This is a HP AU fic, and part of an on-going thing I'm working on. This will be updated out of order, and I'll note as other parts of this AU come up where they fall in this universe's timeline. The spells in this are utterly invented by me, and basically translate to "Soul outside", "Soul inside" and "Bind me" or "hold me". Please also note this has been translated into Russian, by the wonderful VassaR of AO3 and FicBook, and can be read at ficbook, the fic-code is 4545113 [I can't put the actual link in because THANKS FANFICDOTNET]. If you PM me I can direct you to it specifically.

 **Warnings:** Blood, Gore (sort of), Horcruxes, Codependency

* * *

Pietro holds up the knife, silver-steel blade shining under the light of the waning moon. It glows between them, point at a level with Wanda's chin, but several inches away, evenly betwixt them both.

"Are you ready?" she asks, and her voice is a breath. Pietro nods. They have already divided their souls. Killing arsonists with arson is just as effective at dividing souls as the _Avada_ , but they used that as well, together, when two tried to escape the climbing flames. They can feel the torn fragments of themselves, fluttering just beneath their hearts. The moon, waning as it is, tugs on the fragments, prepared as they have, with meditation and focus, to decant them from their bodies into Horcruxes.

Wanda turns, and bares her back to her brother.

The knife cuts a simple line down her back, and blood beads in the fine scarlet line of it. It trickles down, down and down, and Pietro's wand darts rapidly to catch it all, and place it in the bowl they brought for this purpose.

The potion in it is a swirling mass of colour. Sometimes deep brown, sometimes virulently yellow, sometimes acid-green, and sometimes fleshy scarlet, like dead flesh. It contains the hearts of the ones they killed, and the bones of fish, ground down fine. It contains tears of grief and of joy, both collected within minutes of each other, and it contains a pint of honey, fifteen flowers, thirteen acorns, seven fertilised chicken's eggs and three dog's eyes. Now, it also contains Wanda's blood.

Pietro does not have time to seal the slice with dittany before Wanda turns, and takes the knife from him.

"Your turn," she murmurs. Pietro bares his back to his sister, and cannot quite hide the gasp of pain as the knife makes its way down his back, through his skin, from nape to mid-back. Wanda's quick spell catches his blood, and adds it to the bowl. Pietro eyes the now sickly-purple mess.

"Will it be enough?"

Wanda nods. "Living Horcruxes are different," she says, and dips her fingers in it. "Let me mark you?"

Pietro bows his head, and lets Wanda draw the potion, smelling of corpses and of roses, of manure and of sweetness, of sorrow and summer, and snow and joy, and petrichor and a desert onto his skin. The contrasts turn his stomach, and he almost heaves as he smells marsh and woodsmoke, blood and stone, metal and putrefaction. Wanda draws her fingers down his brow, from the centre of his forehead, down his nose, over his lips and down his chest. Scents rise, eggs and weeks old sweat, worn leather and horses, salt-mud and cotton candy. She marks the palms of his hands, the tops of his feet, the backs of his knees, and the point on his back, where spine meets hips, and they try to ignore the sickly sweet smells of life and death and decadence. The last of the mixture is spread over his eyelids, and around the curl of his ears, and smeared over lips top and bottom.

Then Pietro does the same to Wanda.

They stand, nose to nose, when it is done. They wear very little, and trust warming charms to keep them from shivering in the cool of the night. They raise their wands.

" _Anima Externalis_ ," They intone, and try not to lurch as they feel the fluttering ribbons of soul in their chests finally tear loose. The ribbon is scarlet from Wanda, as scarlet as her blood, as scarlet as her eyes in the fire they have to dispose of everything when they're done. It is bright, and it floats out of her chest, from between her breasts and just slightly to the right, like a tangled and torn piece of silk, flickering in the flames. It settles by her wand, just as Pietro's ribbon, blue, like watered silk, and flickering silver with each fluctuation it makes in the breeze, settles by his.

Their eyes meet, dark brown glowing with scarlet flames, to bright blue glowing with energy and magic. They need no words to ask their question, and dare not speak and ruin the magic. _Ready?_ Their eyes ask, and they each incline their heads just a millimetre.

Their wands move forwards, away from their bodies, towards their twins'. Their wand-tips press to the line of sickly purple potion that runs over their sternums, and moves slightly to one side, over their hearts.

Their voices are twin breaths. " _Anima Internalis_."

The ribbons, glowing blue, and glowing scarlet, sink into the skin of their twin. They each relax as they feel it, feel their soul settle into place, and fill the gaps from taking out half their own souls. Wanda feels Pietro's blue coil, contentedly, around her remaining scarlet, feels her scarlet interweave itself with his blue. Pietro's head falls, calmly, peacefully, to her shoulder, as he feels his blue wrap around his sister's scarlet, and her scarlet interlink with his blue. Wanda's brow falls softly to his shoulder, and they both feel the tackiness of the potion as they shift slightly to raise their wands.

" _Tenebit me_ ," They cast, and feel the mortal grey pass over them, sink into their flesh, and anchor their souls in their twins body.

For a long while they are silent, feet bare in leaf litter, the sounds of the night creatures, of the wind, of their crackling fire, and the whisper of their breathing and nothing more.

It is Wanda who smiles, and huffs a laughing breath. "We might as well be one soul now," she says, "Given we have split ours evenly between ourselves."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	3. Fic 2 - Here's The Thing

**Here's The Thing**

 **Summary:** Here's the thing.

Not every universe is the same.

 **Notes:** N/A

 **Warnings:** This can be read as almost incestuous, if you read the twins like that. Not how I intended it, but I leave it to the eye of the beholder.

* * *

Here's the thing.

Not every universe is the same.

* * *

In this universe when the taser arrow was pressed to Wanda's forehead it boosted her gifts, advanced them beyond the pace of their own advancement. It overwhelmed her, and the pain shocked her but in the end?

In the end her scarlet grew.

* * *

In this universe when Pietro is shot Wanda feels it. Feels every bullet digging into her brother's body, killing him quickly, but this time she is stronger. When she yells it is in pain, yes, but only the physical. Scarlet dances around her brighter than a supernova, melting the robots circling her, and reaches, reaches out, toward her brother.

He is her twin, and he is **hers**. None of them are allowed to take him from her. She reaches for him with scarlet fingers and pulls the bullets from him from across the rock they stand on. Lifts him carefully, and sets her magic to let her brother tag along behind Barton. On the carrier his wounds – already healing with the forceful and yet delicate application of her telekinesis – are treated by medics. In the church Wanda stretches her arm out, and pulls Ultron to her.

* * *

He is a wreck, when brought before her. She did not guide him as she did her brother, no, she had him take the swiftest path, through the side of a train, through buildings and rubble, through rocks and robots, and through the gaping arch beside her. She does not look to him, as she directs her gifts to dismantle into nothingness the robots sent at her. She does not look at him as she speaks.

"Do you know what it feels like, hmm, to be shot? Of course not. You are a robot. You are not living. I could tear circuits from you, but you have alternates, and until they are gone, well. I want the punishment I wreak on you to be _final_."

Ultron strains to open his mouth, to use his voice modulator, but Wanda does not permit it, and shakes her head as she moves the carcasses of the robots into a barricade in the roof, filling in the gaping holes.

" **No**. You do not get to talk. Your robots almost killed my brother. You almost left me with _nothing_. You will get _nothing_ , until you understand."

She has been learning to read circuits, since she saw Ultron, and the intermediary of the mind of the android called Vision aided her more than she thought. Besides, she knows now, how much Ultron is like his father. Hovering in the air is the simple question. _And when I do?_

"When you do? I leave that to Pietro. It was he you shot, after all."

She flicks her wrist and with a spray of scarlet she rips out the routers and central processors of the bots coming at her, and prevents Ultron from moving when she sets him down.

Over comms comes the waiting order, and Wanda flicks her wrist to clear the space, and to pluck up Ultron. The robot's limbs dangle, but Wanda does not care. Her scarlet clears the path to the carriers and she drags the robot behind her. She is sure Ultron finds it very undignified, but she cannot bring herself to care.

Not after what he did to Pietro.

* * *

On the carrier Pietro's breathing eases. He can feel as Wanda's mind draws closer, feels as she steps onto the carrier, and hears her soft footsteps, and a screeching sound of metal. She stops by him, and kneels, twists her fingers and sends the scraping robot to lean against the side. Her hands press to her brother's chest, where still-damp blood soaks his shirt.

"You are alright?"

Pietro smiles, and lifts a hand to his sister's hair, "Of course. You were fast enough. Fast as _me_." The grin at the last is utterly Pietro, and Wanda almost laughs. With a few twists of her fingers she renders Ultron conscious, but useless, unable to escape to elsewhere, and unable to move or speak, and curls beside her brother.

"Do you know where we are going?"

Pietro's head shakes slightly, where it lies on the metal of the carrier. "Away. That's all. Barton said … it was something technical. They will blow it up. Everyone is gone from there now."

Wanda breathes a sigh of relief, and, for all she is lying on cold metal, feels warm and peaceful.

Pietro shifts slightly, to let her curl closer. His chest is still healing, and tender, but it is stitched sealed and bandaged, and his own speed will heal it more rapidly than anything. Wanda's magic let him survive the bullets, and healed him enough that he could continue to, and now he offers her all the comfort he can.

* * *

When her breathing has slowed from the race of the fight, to calm, the rock has been imploded. Wanda's fingers slightly twitch, almost in admonishment, toward Ultron. Pietro sits up, when Wanda does, despite his wounds. His hiss of pain makes Wanda turn immediately, ready to help, but Pietro soothes her worry with a simple touch to her cheek.

"Ultron," he asks, "Why did you bring him?"

Wanda's jaw hardens to a tight line, and her eyes go from rich brown to scarlet-cored. "He shot you. I want him to understand what that means."

Pietro laughs, winces, and laughs again. He pulls her into a hug with one arm, and presses his face into her hair.

"You do not need to destroy him for me, sister."

"I was not going to. I was going to teach him pain and then let you have him."

"They will want to destroy him." Pietro's tone is more reminding than refusing, and Wanda smiles.

" _They_ can have him when we're done with him. He almost killed you. He is not allowed to do that."

Pietro strokes back her hair. "If we go with that then I still owe Barton a punch for tasing you like that." He presses the backs of his fingers to her forehead. "He could have damaged your gifts."

Wanda chuckles and tucks against her brother. "He made them strong enough I could save you." She tilts her head, presses a kiss to her brother's cheek. "Besides, I think you did, when we tried to prevent the Vision being born."

"Hm. Maybe."

They are quiet for a while, tucked together, as the carriers fly. They do not settle quickly – S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to find space for the carriers – and from this height the mountains are beautiful in a way the twins have never seen before. They lean against each other, Pietro pressing a kiss to Wanda's hair, Wanda a kiss to Pietro's shoulder, and they watch the world pass by.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	4. Fic 3 - Onyx and Scarlet

**Onyx and Scarlet**

 **Summary:** My mind had an idea because of AOU and Civil War and Maximoffs. It is mostly pain.

 **Notes:** N/A

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Betrayal, Resurrection.

* * *

Vision is patrolling, when he spots the small bead of scarlet slipping into the tower. He knows that shade of scarlet, that precise region of red in the great scale of it, and flies, with the softest sigh, toward Wanda.

Her way is swift, hovering, darting up the elevator shaft, twisting tech to her whims, to get through the tower. Vision does not know who she seeks, and decides to hang back just enough to find out.

He is pleasantly surprised that she does not make a beeline, scarlet in ready hands, to Stark's room. Instead, she turns towards his.

It was not that Vision needed a room, really. More that they felt they had to give him one. His room held a spare Cradle, one which could repair him if necessary, or heal the others. _Does she need healing?_ Vision wonders, before remembering, _They have their own Cradles_.

He hovers, golden gem dim, made hidden by the darkness of his cloak, as Wanda slips a small vial into the Cradle, and powers it on. Vision watches, and Vision waits.

* * *

 _Pietro_.

Wanda can see her brother's form taking shape in the Cradle, lit up in blue and silver and green from the Cradle's lights. Within her mind she can feel him, all she has gathered into herself, of herself, from herself. All the memories her brother ever gave her, all the thoughts he sent her, all the pieces of himself that were hers, and the half a mind that he had sent, scurrying to hers for safety, in the midst of the Battle of Novi Grad.

 _Soon_ , She thinks. _Soon you will have a home again. Will live again_.

She dares not continue this fight, this Civil War of superheroes, without her brother there. Anchoring herself for most a year without him had already strained her more than she could bear and this new battle, all screaming sides and split society and worse riots even than Novi Grad… she needed Pietro back, she needed him back more than anything.

She has felt her mind unfurling, curling into spaces in the edges and the gaps of her cathedral. In the abandoned shrines, the relics and the monstrances, and the nook that holds her cathedral's communion wine. She is but keeper of this place, and not its cleric. She has no right to the power they hold.

And yet, and yet. Her mind slips. Her mind washes out its blood, leaves only grey stone stained cerise, shadowed black, and the gold of ancient idols. Her mind whispers a blasphemous _Dies Irae_ instead of singing a glorious _Te Deum_ , and Wanda fears without her brother to ground her she is lost.

Her hands stroke over the Cradle which holds his body. Her scarlet strokes the glowing silver orb which holds his mind. Wanda breathes in, breathes out, and tries not to think about what she will inevitably have to do.

Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, her dark-self rises. She is clad as a queen, scarlet crown, scarlet cape, dripping in glittering gold, and onyx so dark it is almost empty space. She looks through the windows of Wanda's cathedral, looks at Pietro's remaking body, and smiles a predatory smile.

 _Mine_ , she says.

 ** _MINE_**. Wanda pushes her back, back into the statue the dark-self had carved herself from, and lifts herself to the window. Scarlet wings spread wide, dripping blood. The dark-self may be a queen, but Wanda, Wanda has made herself an angel and, fallen or risen, an angel can overrule a monarch. **_Mine_** , Wanda says. _You will **never** have him._

* * *

Wanda is shaking. Vision almost steps from his cloak of shadows, even stretches out a magenta hand, before remembering Wanda _is on the other side_. It goes against his every screaming instinct, to deny her help or comfort. He can see her mind, scarlet scything into scarlet, stabbing shades of red and black leaving gold haemorrhaging into the architecture of Wanda's mind. Something is tearing her apart from the inside, and Vision wants, desperately, to stretch out his hand, and give her the Stone.

* * *

Wanda's wings spread wide. The dark-self shakes rock and stone from her skin as it tries to trap her in again, and laughs. _You cannot stop me_ , She says, simply. _I am you. If he is yours, he is mine, and when I subsume you he will be only mine_.

 _You will **never** take me_ , Wanda says. **_MY_** _mind. **MY** brother. **MY** friends, **MY** world, **MINE**. You are part and not the whole, and only a whole could take me. You will **never** take me. You will **never** have him._

The dark-self starts to smile, starts to laugh, and chokes when Wanda sends a scarlet wave of blood. Shadows weave into it, gold solidifies through, and Wanda tears apart the stone form of her cathedral to lock the dark-self into an oubliette again. _Forget her_ , She tells her mind. _Forget her shape. Forget her side of the scarlet. There is only **me**._

Wanda's hands wrap around the silver of her brother's mind, around silver curves and curls that rise from the sides in wings almost like hers. They are leaves where hers are liquid, silver where hers are gold and blue where hers are scarlet. They are her brother's and it almost makes her want to sob, to know that she will cut them.

* * *

Vision steps into the room, and even under his cloak of shadows he knows Wanda sees him.

Something in her shoulders relaxes. "Vision."

"Wanda." The android doesn't really know what to say to her. He recalls the battle of Novi Grad, remembers the piece of memory he took from Ultron's last body. Wanda, scarlet and shadow and wrath and grief, tearing Ultron's core from his vibranium-laced primary. Wanda is, he knows, the only one on the Captain's side who could kill him.

* * *

Wanda's lips feel numb as she asks, "Are you going to try to stop me?"

Vision shrugs. "Given how you tried to stop me from being born I think it would be fair." He does not move to stop her.

Wanda's eyes are deep and dark, and the ring of scarlet near the pupil is the only thing stopping them from being black in the dark of the room. Her hand strokes over the cradle, over the lights marking out her brother's body. "I need him," She says, simply. "I need him back. I cannot go on alone." She knows that Vision has every reason to stop this. He is on the other side, is the enemy, does not want her, capable of so much destruction and damage, to have an anchor driving her scarlet to sanity. She knows Vision is never cruel, and prays, through all her cathedral, that he understands.

* * *

Vision can see her mind's dance. For all its stabbing, scything fury moments earlier, it is calm now, swaying with an eerie stillness. He is not sure if this is some play or ploy, some game aiming to win him. There is just Wanda's mind, swaying, Wanda's eyes, watching, and the room in shadow, and the Cradle, his cradle, glowing softly.

Vision's head bows, just a little, and he moves to stand with Wanda. "I will not wake the others," He says, "But I will not betray them further, and help you."

The smile Wanda gives him is soft and sad, and the scarlet in her eyes goes from ring, to teardrop, to encircling ring. "Thank you."

* * *

Pietro's body comes quickly into existence, with the dancing of the lights, and the gift of the cell-sample she had found. The Cradle has all the power it will need, and Wanda's scarlet darting down its circuits to ensure it does not pause. Wanda feels the moment her brother's mind is complete, and sets to work.

She knows that, had she tried this before, she would have needed another mind to help her. Working without her brother has widened her scope, has taught her scarlet how to be more than it already is, has washed scarlet from corners of her mind she did not even know existed, and pulled it from deep wells that sink beneath even the depths of her crypts. Wanda is full of it, the scarlet lifeblood of her magic, and knows she could, if she chose, take Vision apart at every cell and every atom. That she could destroy the tower, storm the city, drive the whole world mad, if she wanted.

She does not want.

She presses her hands flat to the Cradle and forges a link, from her mind, long-lived, to her brothers brain-to-be, newborn. In her mind her form links together its long inhuman fingers to lift Pietro's glowing orb. Wings spread wider still, and suck all scarlet out, so even if the dark-self brought herself forth from nothing she would have no power to use. The angel's eyes open, and there is nothing they can see but red and silver and blue.

Wanda's angel lifts out of her mind, and the silence of the cathedral is deafening.

* * *

Vision sees the moment Wanda leaves her mind. Sees her scarlet mind, ever moving, dancing, darting, a hub of beautiful brightness and magic moving, fade to the palest, palest cerise, the colour briefly bright before fading to pastel. He sees the bond she has formed, as yet unlit by movement, and sees her mind lift off and fall in a scarlet cascade to the soft-glowing mind in the Cradle.

In this moment he could kill her, if he wanted, and kill her brother in the doing. He could wipe out a weapon _in potentia_ and their present most dangerous opponent. He could. He could.

He couldn't.

Wanda is shining bright and scarlet, and warmed to his burgundy where the others did not see him so soon as a person as Thor did. Wanda did not flinch from him when he offered to take her from the rock her brother had died on. Wanda did not flinch when he offered her aid in training. Wanda's powers are unique, Wanda is hurting, Wanda is, Wanda _is_.

 _You think therefore you are_ , His mind says. _She thinks therefore she is._

He knows he cannot destroy her.

* * *

Wanda holds her scarlet deathly, painfully close as she enters the body's mind. She knows if she let it her scarlet would pool into the nooks and crannies of this brain's space, that she would leave a scarlet taint even without meaning. She loops her scarlet tight around her, as ropes, as silks, as threads of rubies and garnets and crimson tourmaline. She holds her black and gold tighter, wears the onyx her dark-self favours, and steps on a clear and silent pool toward the waiting island.

The ripples sing outwards, sing back as they hit the bounds of the mind, and Wanda knows they will sing louder and clearer when she sets her brother in place. She holds the orb, cradled in the long-fingered hands of her angel, and sets it on the island.

And from an island is made a world.

* * *

Vision holds in a gasp, when he sees the mind alight with blue, Wanda's scarlet a tiny single speck in all the swirling silver, but his eyes still dilate, tiny gears zooming his gaze in and out, for all this sight comes from his Stone and not something so simple. He sees the silver encircle the scarlet, interlink and interloop with it, tethered still to Wanda's scarlet as she tugs growing silver threads through the bridge back to her mind.

And then she cuts them.

* * *

Wanda's shoulders hunch, a sob is forced out and holds the cut threads as delicately as she can. They are set by the angel into a shrine, wrapped about a relic, set in the very centre of a monstrance. Pietro's mind, new born, new remade, new in all but memory twists in pain and in confusion, and Wanda sends a wave of soothing scarlet.

 _It's alright_ , She sends, and holds back a sob. _I promise._

She reaches down the bond, and finds the next part of her brother's mind she must excise.

* * *

Wanda's hands are twisted scarlet on the Cradle, like a surgeon's embedded in an operation. Wanda's shoulders try to curl in on themselves, heave once with a sob before she straightens, and her hands warp the world again.

Vision can see what she is doing, pruning the tree of her brother's mind, taking leaf and branch and monkey and bird through her bridge back to her cathedral and storing the silver in her scarlet safety. He can _see_ it, see it happening, but he cannot understand.

"Wanda?" Vision's voice is soft, but he sees the single tendril which reaches briefly towards him. "Wanda, what are you doing?"

* * *

Wanda's eyes close when Vision asks her that, and lead rises from her stomach to her throat as she turns her head to look at the one she might have called friend.

Her scarlet and his golden stone are the only light in the room, and the glow of her scarlet is caught in the teartracks on her face. It is hard for Wanda to speak around the lead in her throat, around each tear blurring her scarlet gaze.

"I am breaking him to save him," She says, and her face twists into sorrow.

* * *

Vision did not think her capable of that. He knows she was interlinked with her brother, that Pietro was an anchor to her for all he ran faster than any anchor was meant to even consider. He knew that Pietro's death had very nearly killed Wanda, that for each other they would do anything, anything at all, but never hurt each other.

He cannot understand and asks, quietly, " _Why?_ "

Wanda's face is unspeakably sad. The room is dark around them, but for Vision's gold and Wanda's scarlet, and the shadows seem almost to loop into Wanda's hair, scarlet lights her tears, gold catches in her eyes by the deep crimson always waiting, and her hands still work and turn over the Cradle, like a surgeon's in a body.

Vision can hear the sob in her words, could have heard it if she had been speaking Sokovian instead of English, Latin instead of either, some language he did not know, but her words carried all the sorrow of a year's loss of everything she had known.

"I don't have a _choice_."

* * *

Wanda takes apart her brother's mind with careful precision, the most delicate touch. She takes his waywardness, his teasing, his willingness to fight, and tucks them into the shrines and amongst the candles and candelabra of her mind.

In the oubliette beneath the cathedral, beneath the crypts, Wanda's dark-self sends scything shadows.

 _This is **wrong**_ , She sends. _We said we would never do this to a mind again, least of all his. He is **ours**._

Wanda's throat is filled with lead, her eyes with tears, and her cathedral and congregation are singing scarlet sorrow.

 _Sometimes_ , She says, _Betrayal is necessary._

The dark-self rises, pulls herself from her oubliette, and pulls shadows with her. _This is not just **betrayal**. You are **mutilating** him._

Wanda sobs, and scarlet teardrops fill her cathedral, raining down. _I know_ , She says. _I don't have a choice. We cannot lose him again._

The dark-self is quiet. _No_ , She says. _No, we cannot._

* * *

Vision watches as Wanda takes her brother's mind apart, piece by tiny piece, and secretes them all separately in shrines of scarlet. There is a delicacy to it, for all her scarlet makes her hands look as bloodied as a surgeon's or a butcher's. When she is done so too is the cradle, and Pietro is woken from death.

* * *

"What happened?" Asks Pietro.

Wanda's head tilts, looks into Pietro's blue eyes and checks to see what there is of her brother remaining in the fragmented shell she has made of him. "I brought you back from death."

"Why?" He asks. His tone is peaceful, his eyes filled with only curiosity. Wanda already misses the ineffable _something_ that defined her brother's gaze.

"Because there is a war," She says, "and I cannot go on without you."

Pietro's head turns, glances to Vision, and then back to Wanda. "Should we fight?"

Wanda's hand cups his cheek almost instantly. "No," She breathes. "No, you mustn't." There are tears already falling, and Pietro's thumbs rise to wipe them away. "I cannot lose you again," Wanda says. Pietro nods, and his hands drop to his sides. Wanda presses a kiss her brother's brow, and sighs.

* * *

Vision watches as Wanda's own mind argues with her, as scarlet harvests silver from its home and makes pliable Pietro who never was.

Vision watches Wanda weave her mind to wholeness, and take her brother by the hand and leave the tower.

Vision watches after them, and wonders if he might have helped Wanda, had he not chosen the wrong side.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	5. Fic 4 - Blue Into Scarlet Scarlet Into B

**Blue Into Scarlet, Scarlet Into Blue**

 **Summary:** It is not lust. It is not desire, it is not passion or want, it is, simply, because Wanda asked it of him, and he could freely give it.

 **Notes:** See End.

 **Warnings:** Sibling Incest, Codependency.

* * *

Wanda's eyes are large and dark and wet as they look up to Pietro's. She is curled in his lap, curled small, and Pietro can feel the memory she had been told to take still swirling in her mind. She wants it gone, and does not know how to get it out.

* * *

Pietro remembered the challenge of the day, while he was sent to run as far away from the castle as he could before his singing bond to his sister pained them too much to continue. He remembered as Wanda was asked to try to "fix" the mind of someone, stealing out a traumatic memory to see what happened. Pietro could run now, run and dodge around trees without even focussing, and he sank into his mind, slipped down the bond to his sister's mind, and watched her navigate the twisted ball of yarn to the knotted core of it all.

It was deep and pulsing red, with bruise purple and blue bleeding through it. _What are you going to do?_ Pietro asked. _You cannot untangle it._

 _No_ , Wanda sent back. _It is a Gordian Knot._ The memory of the myth was sent in swift scarlet to Pietro. _There is only one way to solve such a tangle_.

Pietro's silver bobbed a nod. _Cut it._

Wanda's scarlet, gilded with black as well as gold, scythed through the tangle, and pulled the memory from its heart. The memory was a twisted mass, and there were still twists caught in the ball of thread. But Wanda had been ordered to take only the core memory, the memory of it, and so she did. The mass, twisted purple and red and blue, ugly and angry and a pain deeper than a bruise or a burn was drawn, piece by twisted piece, from the subject's mind and into Wanda's.

And Wanda cut the link to her brother.

Out in the woods Pietro stopped dead. _Wanda?_ He called, and received only his own voice echoing back. He felt out his tree, found his blue branches and stretched them as far as he could. _Wanda!_

There was nothing. Nothing at all.

* * *

 _I've got you_ , Pietro sends, constantly, over and over, overriding the dancing dervish at the brim of his mind that keeps Wanda and him from melting fully into one. _I've got you, I've got you, You're safe from it I promise, I promise, I promise._ Wanda's mind pulls up the memory of their own trauma, of when they were ten, and Pietro wraps tighter around his sister. _I've got you_ , He promises. _You're safe, I will let myself be crushed before you, you're safe, I_ _ **promise**_ **.**

Wanda's face presses into his neck, as he holds them still and close.

* * *

It is not lust. It is not desire, it is not passion or want, it _is_ , simply, because Wanda asked it of him, and he could freely give it.

What Wanda needed, he would give. Even before their colours contrasted and melded into a rich purple together they knew that they were one-in-two. Their souls conjoined and intermingled, as intertwined as they were now. They were of the same, at their core. Different people, different values.

Same soul.

Pietro kisses his sister. Wanda kisses back. They melt into each other, mind and body alike, as only their trust allows them to. Pietro's blue and silver is a skein in Wanda's cathedral. Wanda's scarlet presses a touch to the mezuzah of dancing thought at the boundary of Pietro's mind. They mingle into one, blue into scarlet, scarlet into blue, and become a beacon of shining purple as they coil together on the hospital bed.

 _All we are is each other's_ , Pietro's mind says. Pieces of him are becoming lost, leaves falling from the tree, into Wanda's swirling scarlet.

 _All we are is each other's_ , Wanda's mind says. Her cathedral is tinged with blue, and silver chases alongside the gold.

 _All we are is each other's_ , Their minds sing in tandem as their bodies move.

Beneath Pietro's tree, the deep seed it came from which joins to the blooming core in the nest of branches above, is a singing circuit of silver. _What Wanda needs, what Wanda needs, what Wanda needs_. He will give anything, if it is what she needs.

In the shadows and scarlet of Wanda's foundations the blocks build on each other. _What keeps Pietro safe. What keeps us whole_.

She guides them. He guards them. That is how they have always been, will always be. In amongst the blue, the silver, the gold and the scarlet, the mingled bright purple as rich and royal as a throne, the dark purple, the burning bruise, is tossed on floodwaters of love and trust and adoration of aspects.

 _What keeps Wanda safe_ , sings the purple chased with silver.

 _What keeps us whole_ , sings the purple laced with scarlet.

The ball of burning bruises is tossed up, torn up, torn apart and thrown out into fading tatters.

Wanda's mind sings a golden shining pure joy, and their bodies shake to stillness.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** I have a lot of beliefs and headcanons re: the AOU Maximoff twins, which I'll explain here:

\- I firmly believe Wanda is an outright telepath in AOU, not just able to induce fear but also able link to minds. Given her reaction at the end of AOU, when Pietro is shot, as well as what she says to Ultron, I additionally believe she has a permanent link to her brother's mind.

\- I see their minds both as sites/places, as well as colourscapes. Wanda is scarlet, black and gold, and a cathedral in shape that is vast beyond vast, while Pietro's is a blue, silver and grey tree, with winds of thoughts at the edge of it, which they use to divide their minds and prevent them from spilling into one being.

\- I personally believe they were raised in a Jewish household until they were ten and their parents were killed, and that they both became agnostic afterwards. Wanda's mind takes a cathedral shape to acknowledge how religion shaped her but to deny the religion which did shape her, while Pietro maintains a mezuzah in his mind even as he refuses faith in the physical world.

\- The way I have them mapped, they consider one another part of themselves. Halves of a whole, part of the same organism ("If you stay here you'll die" "I just did"). As such the idea of denying one another something is bizarre to them - you would not deny yourself food when you need it, so why withhold it between them? You would not deny yourself comfort if you needed it, so why withhold it between them?

\- I don't think the twins would be incestuous as they are, nor that they would have an incestuous relationship. Personally i think they consider that a line they do not want to cross, that they consider that like their minds slipping into one - against their maintained individuality, despite being shared beings.

\- That said, I think something would drive them to an incestuous incident, but whether they would continue in that state would be up to them and I don't think they would, for the aforementioned reasons. In this case Wanda's desire for comfort and her only trusting Pietro to give it to her as she needs it led to this.

\- Lastly, I wrote it as I did, not for the "healing sex" trope, but to show how they don't perceive it how others would, how they justify it to themselves, and also because sometimes I cannot write porn for shit, and I didn't want to write this as porn. Their relationship is a beautiful and complex and multi-layered fucked up thing, and I wanted to explore that.

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	6. Fic 5 - Prompt: I would follow you anywh

**Prompt: I would follow you anywhere.**

 **Summary:** Wanda had found the notes and the records, when peeling through the layers of someone's mind (globules of colour, purple as a mangostine, orange as a tangerine, brightly changing like watermelon, until she came to the sickly-pale globules of truth). She had found that Tony Stark was dangerous, yes. That he was powerful, yes.

But also that he was ignorant, and that he had been betrayed by a trusted friend.

He had not quite sold the weapon that killed their parents.

 **Notes:** N/A

 **Warnings:** Codependency

* * *

 **i.  
** The day they step away from the ones who have taught them and trained them the sky is blue and the trees coated in silver. With Pietro's colours around them they flee the castle with all of Pietro's speed. Wanda had found the notes and the records, when peeling through the layers of someone's mind (globules of colour, purple as a mangostine, orange as a tangerine, brightly changing like watermelon, until she came to the sickly-pale globules of truth). She had found that Tony Stark was dangerous, yes. That he was powerful, yes.

But also that he was ignorant, and that he had been betrayed by a trusted friend.

He had not _quite_ sold the weapon that killed their parents.

Pietro was not pleased when Wanda told him. Vengeance was simple. Vengeance was understandable. Vengeance _worked_ and allowed for swift strikes well suited to his new gift. But in this, Stark, the most hated Stark, was innocent, and the one who was guilty, one Obadiah Stane, was dead. They had no reason to stay with those who might allow them to fight against an innocent man. Wanda's scarlet danced them free, and Pietro's coursing silver brought them back to the city.

* * *

 **ii.  
** The city is not quite as they remembered it. The world had changed while they had been cloistered away. Wanda decides they should go south, and as ever, Pietro follows. The world has changed, they realise, not just the city. Stories only gradually filtered to them in the castle have full blown mythologies outside it, and Wanda delights in taking them apart and piecing them back together.

Pietro, Wanda knows, will follow where she goes now, with his speed and his strength all tied into the eternal dance he had made of his mind, all anchored around _Protect her_. Sometimes Wanda fears her scarlet has bound him more strongly to her, and then he does something, something entirely himself, and knows her scarlet could never make him other than he was. Pietro will follow her because he is her brother, and nothing is more important to him than her safety and their vengeance.

* * *

 **iii.  
** They travel. Time bleeds together. They do not travel far, but it feels like they do. For twins who had never left Sokovia going to Germany or Austria or Hungary, so close as they may be, feels like going far. They return, ever, to Sokovia, and bed down in the church in the centre of the city. They will have no home, not just yet, but they have a place of safety.

* * *

 **iv.  
** The riots worsen. Sometimes soldiers tear through the streets, and it is all Wanda can do not to step out with her scarlet and stop them from scaring the people. Sometimes it is Pietro she must stop, stop before they reveal where they hide to those they hide from.

They have no wish to return to the grasp of what they now know to be HYDRA.

(They had not been to a synagogue in years, they no longer Believed, but Nazis were Nazis and their uncaringness of all who had died in that castle made Wanda want to _burn_ )

* * *

 **v.  
** The city tore free and Wanda did all she could to find her feet.

"Pietro?"

 _Here_. His voice is a whisper, a tendril of thought down the bridge they share, and he is running through the city, learning what is happening. _Avengers,_ he sends, and an image of them.

Wanda pauses. She hates Stark still. It was his weapon that had killed their parents, his lack of attention that had sold it but… but he had not sold it, had not meant to sell it, and was here, presumably enough, to stop this.

 _We help them_ , she sends, and Pietro is there in a moment to carry her to them.

* * *

 **vi.  
** Wanda does not know how to explain to them who they are or what they can do, and sends scarlet memories to fill them in.

"We're helping," she says, recalling the right words, the English grammar. "This is our city. We will protect it."

The one dressed in a flag nods, the ones dressed in black pause, and the two inhuman creatures, one maroon and magenta and one in armour, seem considering.

"What can we do?"

* * *

 **vii.  
** The city is rising and Wanda does not know how long they can breathe in the ever-thinning air. Back at the epicentre - beneath the castle - Stark is trying to reverse what has happened, but here, amongst the damaged city, with strange robots, like Stark's but not, flying and shooting at all they could see, all they can do is try to get people off the rock.

The rock flies higher, and Wanda watches the world shrink away.

"It's beautiful, in a way," Pietro says, pausing behind her. "But horrifying. This shouldn't be possible."

Wanda's laugh is little more than a tired exhalation. " _We_ shouldn't be possible," she says, "But we are. The world is turning terrible, brother-mine."

"The world can turn however it wants," Pietro says. "We will always have each other."

Wanda does smile at that. "Yes. Shall we stay then? In this terrible world made of horrifying and beautiful?"

Pietro watches a robot disintegrate in the yellow beam of the maroon creature and nods. "Until it supersedes the horror you create, and the beauty you offer."

Wanda takes his offered hand. "To the fight then," she says, "And the Avengers."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	7. Fic 6 - Prompt: Remember

**Prompt: Remember**

 **Summary:** Wanda got out and it was the hardest thing she'd ever done. Others trained, others enhanced, those she could leave behind. But her _brother_ … she had hoped her power might protect him from their warping, might let her stop them, but when they strapped him to a chair, and wave after blinding wave started stealing and sealing his memories away she saved all she could of him and ran.

She loved her brother, yes, she loved him more than life itself, but she had to remain whole to save him.

 **Notes:** N/A

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Mindwiping.

* * *

 **i.  
** Wanda got out and it was the hardest thing she'd ever done. Others trained, others enhanced, those she could leave behind. But her _brother_ … she had hoped her power might protect him from their warping, might let her stop them, but when they strapped him to a chair, and wave after blinding wave started stealing and sealing his memories away she saved all she could of him and ran.

She loved her brother, yes, she loved him more than life itself, but she had to remain whole to save him.

* * *

 **ii.**  
When Pietro wakes it is with no memories, but a sense that something is missing. The techs around him murmur things to each other, dart worried glances to him and away, and think he will not notice without memories as he is.

They forget his gift, his speed, and that, as he is relearning, some things run deeper than mere memory.

Pietro knows he has lost something - lost some _one_ \- even if he cannot remember her face or name.

* * *

 **iii.  
** She hears of what they do, down alleyways, through streets, in the minds of those she passes. The silver blur, the darting soldiers and then a death and nothing more. Her brother, her protector a murderer, trapped in a team of them. Trapped tracking her. Wanda runs further, and tried not to hate the fact she was fleeing her brother.

* * *

 **iv.**  
He is assigned a team - one like him he, learns over time, one without memories - and sent on jobs. There is Ursula, stronger than anyone, and Casimir not as fast, but almost as nimble as he. There are others, without powers, but also without memories, and Pietro learns how to work with them, plan with them, kill with them, as their orders are given.

He tries to ignore the itch in his mind that says he should be doing things differently, doing them for one person, rather than a group, and that the one person wasn't there.

He is glad his speed means his slip-ups aren't noticed.

* * *

 **v.  
** Less advanced, more advanced, less tech, more tech, less people, more people, Wanda runs and hides in the ways she had told her brother of but never explained. She guided them, he guarded them, and he had never quite understood how she decided what they must do.

That was the only thing saving her now.

* * *

 **vi.**  
Pietro cannot see the sense behind the pattern his team is sent out. Almost every day they are given new orders, told to go somewhere else, and always after the same woman. Dark hair, dark eyes ( _grey_ he thinks, and sometimes, _brown_ , but it is hard to be certain), slender and fast. Pietro wonders at that. She is fast - not like he is, superhumanly - but in a way that suggests she _knows_ of speed like his. He tries to plan around it, tries going faster or slower, but, somehow, she always slips through their fingers.

It does not help, he thinks, that the techs insist on running those blinding, headache-inducing checks after each job.

* * *

 **vii.**  
Sometimes Wanda wonders why they had taken her brother first, strapped him to the chair, wiped his mind. They must have known she would sense it. They _must_ have, they had seen her scarlet break bones when they had tried to hurt Pietro, even when she could not see. Had they feared he would run with his new speed if they did not? That he would have left her behind? Wanda knows he never would, never _could_. He had crafted himself from when they were _ten_ , long years of denying himself this and that and this other, simply to protect her. He had made her his pole star, his guiding light.

It wasn't as simple as that he wouldn't leave her, that he _might not_ leaver her. It was instead that he _couldn't_.

* * *

 **viii.**  
Pietro's headaches after each job do not make it easier to track her down. His speed may let him heal faster, but the headaches are never quite gone before they strap him back into the chair and run whatever checks it is they do. He knows he woke in the chair, without any memories, and begins to wonder if that is what the chair is for.

To hide a past, or to remove it entirely.

* * *

 **ix.**  
Sometimes Wanda considers making herself bait. Letting them come for her and capture her, and then thrusting all Pietro's memories that she had saved back into his mind. She has taken time to train what she can, eked thoughts from his mind when he was in range, learned his training and that of the team he now runs with, learned how to use a scope and a sniper rifle, and track people by their minds to find them and to kill them. She is not the best of shots but then she does not need to be.

She can make them stand still for her, after all.

She considers being bait, considers dangling her trailing scarlet before her brother like the scent and spoor of blood, and letting him run wreathed in silver towards her. With him going at that speed… she would have moments maybe, mere moments to remake his mind to how it had been, with its great grey tree and blue leaves and glasslike hummingbirds, and the waiting mezuzah at the brink of it all.

Moments, she decides, will have to be enough.

* * *

 **x.**  
They have not been sent out for a week, and Pietro's headache is quite gone when they next receive word of where the woman hides. She is in Sokovia, they learn, hiding in the alleys and abandoned homes, and sometimes spotted in the abandoned church.

Pietro, they decide, should go in first. He is faster, after all, and can tranq her before she even knows what happened.

* * *

 **xi.**  
Wanda sits in the church that evening in perfect silence. She is combing through her mind, stripping out the church façade she has let grow there since she was small. She studies the church around her and pulls out all the parts she can see she has drawn from it - the pulpit and the choir stands and the font, the small curlicues near the ceiling and the crossways arch that holds the vault up. Wanda draws scarlet wings and scarlet claws over dark stone and cradles the silver fragments than come forth as the stone crumbles away.

When she is done her mind is as it had been, a synagogue. The faith that shaped her even if she could not Believe any longer. For this though, for this she needed to Believe, believe truly that she would have a chance to save her brother.

 _Siblings should not fight, after all_ , she thinks, and sends her scarlet spinning out to find her brother.

* * *

 **xii.**  
Pietro is kitted out, and holds the tranq dart carefully in his hand. His feet are jittering they way they do when he is truly uncertain, an unrestfulness that tends to worry the rest of the team. He flashes them a quick smile, laughs at Casimir's attempted joke, and stands.

"The church?" he asks and Ursula nods.

"The church."

* * *

 **xiii.**  
Wanda feels him coming, the sliver of darting silver, slipping through the city. _Brother-mine_ , her mind says, _brother-mine, brother-mine, brother-mine, what have they_ _ **done**_ _to you?_

There is no tree in his mind, there is not even an island, or single lone hummingbird left. There is a desert, and Wanda wants to weep it back to life.

* * *

 **xiv.**  
Pietro gets to the church at is met by a wave of scarlet. There is static in his ear as the tiniest tendril twists and crushes the earpiece, and the woman stands before him, eyes red, hands red, dressed in red, as though she was War made to life.

"Oh, Pietro," she whispers. "What have they done to you?"

He is still, _held_ still, and cannot move in the scarlet that holds him from the ground, holds him in place so he cannot gain traction and try again. The woman peels open his fingers, rolls the tranq between her own before tossing it in the air for her scarlet to crush.

"I wonder," she says, voice still so soft, "Did they decide that for you, or did you choose on your own?"

Pietro does not answer, but the woman waves a hand. "It does not matter. Either way, you would never hurt me."

Her eyes are dark and touched with red when they look into his. "Would you, brother of mine?"

* * *

 **xv.**  
She has had more than moments, and Wanda does not know if she quite believes it. She got first strike, her scarlet _held him_ , and Wanda tries to decide how she should give her brother back his memory. His team would, no doubt, be coming for her soon. She thinks she can feel them, minds like ants, prickling their way towards them both. Wanda cradles her brother's face in her hands.

"You must _remember_ ," she says, and lets her scarlet strike him.

* * *

 **xvi.**  
Pietro did not quite understand what was happening, what even… his mind was changing, warping, the fragments he had been taught flying up like sand in a storm, something else raining down in red and blue and silver and _love love love_ and _Wanda_ is there before him and he _knows_.

* * *

 **xvii.**  
"We have to leave," he says and Wanda relaxes. His tree is still growing, rising up from the great well of _love_ she has re-dug for him and filled with her own scarlet even before she hit his upwelling blue, but he is back and he is her brother. Wanda nods.

"Get us away," she says, and there is nothing but Pietro's silver speed, and their shared safety.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	8. Fic 7 - Prompt: And all their world come

**Prompt: And all their world come crashing down.**

 **Summary:** When they gain gifts it is odd. Pietro - they say that is his name and it feels right, but he is almost certain there is a word missing - can run, but only so far and so fast. Wanda's mind is a grasping thing reaching out and out and out, and scarlet spinning wide and strong from her fingers.

Pietro is the only one of their group to trust her enough to let her practice on him, let her dance through his mind, turn its shattered spread of sand into a shining sphere of hard glass and to let her still his speed to nothing. They feel oddly comfortable with each other, and they're not sure why.

They are glad of it, all the same, some days, when they are able to rest together, curled into each other.

 **Notes:** This is set during CATWS, for reference.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, (Unwitting) Sibling Incest, Mindwiping.

* * *

 **i.**  
They had taken Wanda first. He heard them unlock her door, and walk her down the corridor, beyond his hearing. He _hates_ this, separate rooms, separate training, separate _everything_. They do not understand, that they are twins, that they need each other, that they've never been without each other, that this is _hurting_ them. He listens to Wanda's footsteps, light and soft, down the corridor until he cannot hear anymore.

* * *

 **ii.**  
He hears when they return, when they push Wanda into her room again. She doesn't look at him, through the window. Doesn't even try to glance, and when he knocks on the wall to get her attention she doesn't respond.

"Wanda?" he asks.

"Who's Wanda?"

Pietro sits in stunned silence until the soldiers come to take him away.

* * *

 **iii.**  
When they gain gifts it is odd. Pietro - they say that is his name and it _feels_ right, but he is almost certain there is a word missing - can run, but only so far and so fast. Wanda's mind is a grasping thing reaching out and out and out, and scarlet spinning wide and strong from her fingers.

Pietro is the only one of their group to trust her enough to let her practice on him, let her dance through his mind, turn its shattered spread of sand into a shining sphere of hard glass and to let her still his speed to nothing. They feel oddly comfortable with each other, and they're not sure why.

They are glad of it, all the same, some days, when they are able to rest together, curled into each other.

* * *

 **iv.**  
They do not mean to, the first time. After the fight they had just survived - Pietro nicked by a bullet, Wanda almost concussed, the others with broken bones, and singed fingers and one _dead_ \- they cling to each other, cling desperately, press brows to shoulders, faces to necks, lips to lips, and come undone in each other's arms.

* * *

 **v.**  
Pietro is the only one they seem to trust with Wanda after that battle. He is her guard always, and the others are divided up, Cecil and Nicholas, Ursula and Hedwig, Casimir and Miriam, assigned to guard one another, to work as the core of a team with assigned soldiers to help. Wanda is taken to the site in Pietro's stable arms, and he sets up scope and stage in mere minutes.

Job after job goes swimmingly, people turned to their side with Wanda's scarlet, or killed when it fails with Pietro's perfect eye.

* * *

 **vi.**  
Wanda, one evening, is pacing in their safehouse and it worries Pietro. The job today had been bad enough, watching the Asset stalk through a street and cause mayhem, gunfire everywhere, cars crashed and collided… it almost reminds him of something, and he worries it _has_ reminded Wanda of something. He runs through the room, shuts off all the bugs he can find, and sets them on the table.

"Wanda?" he asks, and smiles when her fingers stroke down his face.

"Memories," she says. "That's all it is. Some old memories I dug up."

Pietro watches her face intently, watching to be certain. "You know you can-"

"I can tell you. I know, Pietro. But you do not need to worry this time." Her smile is soft and certain, and he can feel the scarlet of her mind softly warming the fog of his worry into dissipating. "I promise," she says, and it is settled.

* * *

 **vii.**  
That night, when they are curled together in bed, Pietro waits in the bridge between their minds. Like everything between them the bridge feels _right_ , like it is meant to be, and Wanda leaves it in place more often than not. He knows she can feel him waiting.

She offers him a hand, stretching from her end of the bridge to his. "Come," she says. "I will show you the memories."

* * *

 **viii.**  
 _Curled together beneath rock and rubble, two children, pale skin, dark hair, eyes watching a missile across the crushing chamber from them…_

 _Fingers knotted together as they are told, "Wanda, Pietro… I'm so sorry. Your parents are dead."_

 _Someone threatening Wanda, Pietro close behind: "Don't touch my sister!"_

 _People following them from school, Wanda pointing one way, "That way brother. I'll meet you at the old church."_

Pietro is still in bed when his eyes open from it, and he stares at the ceiling for long minutes. Eventually he sits up, looks to Wanda. "Check my mind," he says. "We have to know if its all true."

* * *

 **ix.  
** "We didn't know," Wanda says, and her hands comb through his hair. "We didn't know we were twins."

Pietro shakes his head, still burying his eyes into his knees, curled up as he is like a child. "We still. Wanda. Wanda, we-"

Wanda shrugs. "We knew we were close. We've always been close, always will be close, and them removing our memories, altering our loyalties and our personalities as they did couldn't stop that. _They_ caused it. _They_ didn't tell us."

Pietro looks up at her, tears in his eyes and Wanda remembers the last time he cried, when they were ten. "Do you think," he says, his voice as quiet as hers, "That I do not recall how we were, now you have gone through my mind? I know how close we were, but we were never… we were never _this_. We promised we would never be _this."_

The hand in his hair runs softly over his scalp. Wanda crouches beside him. "And we do not have to be now," she says, and he can feel her scarlet weaving around the branches of his tree, singing out _i promise i promise i promise_. "We know who we are. We know what they did to us. We can be ourselves again." In his mind the threads of her scarlet are bright against his blue and begging him _don't leave, brother, please don't leave, please, please, please, i love you, you are_ _ **half**_ _of me-_

Pietro takes her hand. "I won't leave. I would never leave you."

He says the words just soon enough for Wanda's smile to blink away beading tears.

* * *

 **x.**  
It is easy, instead, to leave HYDRA. They may not have all their memories left anymore, but they have enough, and they have their training. They slip away, slip into the streets, and have Pietro's speed and Wanda's scarlet and their shared rifle when the helicarriers rise.

 _Project Insight_ Wanda recalls, and sends darting scarlet to search through the minds of those aboard. _S.H.I.E.L.D._ \- fading, _S.H.I.E.L.D._ \- fading, _S.H.I.E.L.D._ \- fading, **HYDRA** , bright and bold and like a beating heart. Wanda finds its anchors and its foundations and rips it to pieces.

It takes three more people before that helicarrier crashes down.

* * *

 **xi.**  
Pietro gives her his memories afterwards, of the Asset fighting Captain America, and the red-haired woman, and the man with wings.

"They fought," he says and Wanda nods. "Maybe we should fight alongside them?"

Wanda smiles. "We'll have to find them first," she says. "Good thing I found their minds."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	9. Fic 8 - Prompt: The Way of the Sith

**Prompt: The Way of the Sith.**

 **Summary:** When they train it is together. That was the agreement they had made, when the Jedi had taken them in. Master Yoda had counselled against it, counselled that their closeness could send them to the Dark Side if they were trained, but Windu had decided that so long as they had each other when training and after training neither would fall so far.

They train together, Wanda's skill with the Force and Pietro's speed with his lightsabre, and get better and better together.

 **Notes:** Star Wars AU, obviously. Most of the Star Wars stuff is accurate, down to the Hydra system, though the Force Amplifier is made up (but given the amount of crap in Star Wars there's probably something alike to it somewhere in that universe). Planet Strucker is a blatant MCU reference, as are Novi Grad and Sokovi (not rendered Sokovia here for obviousness reasons). Barton is obviously Clint, Grievous is Star Wars canon, Crimson Witch is a reference to a Wolverine and the X-Men episode in which she is misnamed. List and Cho are from MCU canon, Jocasta and Alkhema are both feminine robots created by Ultron in various comic continuities. Togruta and Bothan are both Star Wars, Rainer is from Guardians of the Galaxy and thus MCU. Mon Cala is an oceanic planet from Star Wars.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.**  
When they train it is together. That was the agreement they had made, when the Jedi had taken them in. Master Yoda had counselled against it, counselled that their closeness could send them to the Dark Side if they were trained, but Windu had decided that so long as they had each other when training and after training neither would fall so far.

They train together, Wanda's skill with the Force and Pietro's speed with his lightsabre, and get better and better together.

(They do not tell the Jedi of their nightmares, crushed beneath rubble and vehicles as red lights from guns and lightsabres play outside their sight)

* * *

 **ii.**  
Wanda learns how to influence people first, Pietro is the first to learn how to jump so high with the Force to help. Pietro never quite grasps the fluid way Wanda influences others, makes them believe or do things, and she is never quite as fast as he when it comes to running the courses.

* * *

 **iii.**  
They go through the trials together - those that they can - and Pietro protects his sister where he is able. They have been criticised for that before, advised that Wanda must protect herself, and that Pietro must learn to be away from her side, but here they must be themselves and still be worthy and so he stays. Wanda is incredible to Pietro, darting through, letting the Force slip and slide around her to make the way as smooth as they need it. People influenced, objects moved, and Pietro guarding all the way through.

When they are alone for the Trial of Isolation Wanda tells him she will remember their childhood and he promises to do the same.

* * *

 **iv.**  
When Wanda is refused a pass it is all Pietro can do to hold in his emotions and not lash out with the Force around them. Wanda, they say, relies too much on misdirection and influence, and that is too much like lies and trickery and that, Master Yoda says, is the path to the Dark Side of the Force.

Wanda squeezes her brother's hand then lets go and lifts her chin. "Well," she says. "It's a good thing I made my sabre red, then, isn't it?"

Then perception warps and Wanda is _gone_.

* * *

 **v.**  
Pietro has nightmares for weeks, and Master Windu wonders sometimes if he shouldn't remain with the students, if he cannot manage his thoughts so well. Pietro quietly, softly, reminds the Council that he cannot remember a time he was apart from his sister barring the isolation trial, and the times they had almost died.

"It is not, honoured Masters, as though I have many _good_ memories associated with my sister's departures."

* * *

 **vi.**  
Eventually, oh eventually, the nightmares begin to ease. Pietro knows, somewhere deep down, that this means Wanda's are easing too, that she has found something to give her peace and help her, and he hopes she will visit when well enough, or at least tell him where she is. He hopes, even more than that, that this means Wanda isn't _dead_ , that she lives still and that the peace of his dreams are not born from her resting in it.

Sometimes he wishes he was one of those species with telepathy, those able to, with or without Force training, reach out through the stars to find others, to know if they were well, let alone _alive_.

Alas, the mind was ever Wanda's realm, just as the physical was his.

* * *

 **vii.**  
The Council of Reassignment eventually sends him to Strucker, a small planet in the Hydra system, where Sith activity has been playing up. He is, they point out, one of their best fighters, and more than able to face down the largely fledgling Sith on the planet.

Pietro sighs and packs his things. At least, he thinks, travelling he will not have to think on his sister, with so many new things to see.

* * *

 **viii.**  
The plant is a rocky mess of rubble, and Pietro has to blink back memories of home when they set down. He is met by an older Jedi who says to call him Barton and they settle at the quarters the Jedi Council arranged ahead of time.

After sparring Barton offers him some tea and they talk.

"Most of the Sith won't be much trouble," he says. "Most of them are apprentices - poor apprentices - besides. If you see one of metal, that's Darth Ultron, get out of his way. No idea what he used to be, but he's more droid than Grievous, and harder to kill besides."

Pietro drinks his tea. "Any others to keep a watch for?"

Barton shrugs. "Droids in black are Ultron's, he keeps them in a hive. Nasty weapons, but easy enough to dispatch of. No idea where he keeps getting more from, though. Of his apprentices - he has about twelve, no idea why he's breaking pattern - keep an eye for the Crimson Witch. You'll know who she is. Dressed all in red and fast as a demon. She'll give even you a run for your money."

* * *

 **ix.**  
Pietro has nightmares that night, but not of childhood. Much worse than childhood.

He dreamed of fighting his sister, and of killing her.

* * *

 **x.**  
His first days are relatively peaceful. He only comes across a few droids, and they are, as Barton says, easy enough to dispatch of. The fifteenth day pits him against a bearded human apprentice, quick but not as quick as he. They die after a quick fight, and Pietro brings them back to town to be logged in the morgue. Barton pulls the collar of the apprentice's robes down to reveal a brand and nods.

"Klaue," he says. "Well done."

Pietro nods. "Do the others have names too? I'd like to put a name to a face if I'm going to be killing more of them, even if its for the Jedi Council and to rid the world of the Sith."

Barton shrugs, and points him out the door. The walk home is usually quiet, but Barton is oddly talkative in his way. "There's List," he says. "Used to be a doctor half the planet over, low level Force sensitive with a knack for patching things up that might not want to be patched up. Not sure why Ultron went for him but he did. Cho, another doctor. She was one of ours until Ultron, no idea what he did to bring her over. Stark, back on the Reassignment Council, wants to try to save her still, thinks she doesn't want to be here. Crimson Witch, I've told you about. No idea where she's from. Other than that… Jocasta and Alkhema. Sisters and mostly droid at this point. What isn't droid has been cybernetically enhanced. And then the six or seven others, yet to be identified firmly enough."

Pietro's mind is reeling with _too much information_ and he blinks. "So," he says. "List: Doctor. Cho: Doctor. Crimson Witch: Unknown. Jocasta and Alkhema: mostly droid. Then, assorted others?"

Barton nods. "Pretty much."

* * *

 **xi.**  
He spots Darth Ultron one day, and sees why Barton said to get away. The Sith Lord is huge, seven, maybe eight feet tall, and strides towards the town in an easy lope, metal glittering in the sun. Pietro calls Barton on the comlink and is ordered back immediately.

"Don't go against him," Barton says, and pulls a face at Pietro's quizzical expression. "Orders from the Council. We've lost too many to him so far, we're waiting until we have a better idea of what he's up to and what it would take to kill him."

Pietro nods. "Training until he's gone then? Or are you too tired old man?"

Barton laughs, and pulls down something strange from the wall. "Let me teach you archery," he says. "See how good you are with that."

* * *

 **xii.**  
Archery is something new, utterly new, to Pietro, but he cannot help but think how Wanda would have loved it. The peaceful nature of it, the elegance, the calm but instinctive way one had to hold it and _focus_ and _ah there_ shoot the arrow to its target.

"Where did you learn this?" he asks and Barton shrugs.

"The ones who raised me," he says. "I was late to the Jedi, they found me after following my troupe around for months. Said they could feel me tugging on the Force for some of my shots, but not enough to focus in on."

Pietro nods, recalling similar stories. He and Wanda had been lucky, he thought, to have been found for calling the Force to them after one try and not many.

* * *

 **xiii.**  
When Pietro first sees her he is sure he is dreaming. Dressed all in red, climbing down from a flier, but…

"Wanda?" he asks, because the way she moved, her height, her hair he cannot see her face but-

A mask faces him, as red as blood. "I am the Crimson Witch. Leave me be, Jedi."

The voice is… _could_ it be Wanda? Would she really have…?

He remembers what she had said that day, the day the Council had denied her and she had left. _It's a good thing I made my sabre red, then, isn't it?_

But Wanda… she wouldn't, would she? She who had always tried to make him help the other Padawans, the younger ones, who'd encouraged kindness, she wouldn't…. She couldn't…

He is grateful for his training in speed fighting when the Crimson Witch's lightsabre swings in front of his face.

" _Leave me be_ means _stop staring, Jedi_." Her voice is a snarl, and Pietro cannot help but think of when Wanda was angry, when she was furious, when something had been so _wrong_ she had made things around her _shake_. He pulls his own lightsabre free, and parries.

He almost smirks when she seems startled. "Bet you didn't see that coming."

She makes a noise almost like a growl and leaps, lightsabre flashing, and Pietro parries again, quickly, before darting in to strike. She parries. It has been so long since he fought someone this fast, someone almost as fast as he, and even if this is not Wanda, even if this is just some other Sith with all his sister's speed he almost cannot dislike them for this. It feels like sparring with his sister and he has _missed_ this so.

Pietro is startled to find he is almost laughing as he leaps to a rooftop to follow her fighting, and they duel across the town's rooftiles. Speed is everything in this, he knows, when they seem already so close in skill. Speed is everything and if this _is_ his sister he knows he is faster.

Two fingers fly by in his vision, "Stop this," is said as firm as an order and he pushes through the wave of compulsion.

He laughs again, he cannot help it. "You have to try harder than that, Sith lady. My sister was better at that than you and she was trained as Jedi."

 _Is_ that a flinch? He almost pauses too long to wonder, when her lightsabre flashes towards him again. Pietro reminds himself _focus_ , and responds in kind.

* * *

 **xiv.**  
Pietro is not sure how long he has been fighting when a strike with the butt of his sabre knocks her mask briefly loose. He catches a glimpse of skin, fair like his own, of dark brows and dark eyes and, "Wanda?" he asks again. He cannot help it.

A swipe of her fingers pushes the mask back into place. They seem to have paused, for a moment at least, atop the repair shop. "I am," she says, "The Crimson Witch. Leave me, Jedi, to go about my business."

Pietro remembers what the Council had said about misdirection and tries again. "Crimson Witch isn't a name. What's your name?"

The woman barks a laugh. "Magda."

 _Mother's name_ , Pietro remembers. _Wanda's middle name_.

Pietro tries again. "Your first name, your personal name." He pauses, considers, and turns off his sabre. "Or are you too scared to take off your mask?"

He knows, if this is indeed Wanda, she is rolling her eyes in the pause it takes her to turn off her sabre and raise her hands to her mask. "If I do this," she says, "Will you stop chasing me, stop fighting me?"

Pietro pauses and her hands begin to dip. If this _is_ Wanda he cannot leave her to the Dark Side, he cannot, she is his _twin_ \- there is the buzz of her lightsabre switching on and Pietro steps back.

"I will." _This time_.

The mask comes off and Pietro almost sighs in sadness. It is _not_ Wanda. The face is almost their mother's, but it is not his sister. He would know her even after months apart, even years, and while this woman may move like her it is not her.

Then he catches a glimpse of a waver at the edge of her face, and the way her fingers twist inside her robes. He finds the Force about them and _pushes_.

The illusion falls.

* * *

 **xv.**  
"Wanda," he says, and does not need to say more. _Wanda, it's_ **you**.

She can hear him, he knows she can, they had always heard each other if they thought loud enough and she has retained her skill with tricks of the mind. She must be able to hear him, his mind singing out _Wandawandawandawanda_ in glad, adoring tones, and _you're_ _ **alive**_ _oh thank the Force._

Wanda flinches. "You thought I'd died?"

Pietro swallows past a lump. "The nightmares eased. I thought you'd come back when that happened, that you'd come to terms with what they said and contact me but…"

Her eyes drop to the floor. "But I didn't."

Pietro wants to rush forward, wants to take her hands, cradle her face, hug her, hold her to him and never let her go, but she is still holding onto her lightsabre so tightly her knuckles are as pale as snow.

"Oh, _Stars_ , Wanda, why didn't you tell me you were alive?"

One scarlet shoulder shrugs. "I am Sith now. You are Jedi."

Pietro almost sobs but: "You're my _sister_. I would _never_ betray you, _could_ never betray you, you _know_ that." He is blinking away tears as he repeats himself, a gentle whisper. "You _know_ that."

"Betrayal is-" she already sounds like she is reciting something and Pietro remembers after a moment more.

"Betrayal is the way of the Sith."

Her voice is gentle, almost an apology in tone alone, and she takes his hand. "I am Sith now," she says, and lets his hand slip free. "You should go. You should let _me_ go. We aren't of the same anymore."

"Please," Pietro says, and he does not care if it sounds like begging. He lets out all the emotions he, as a Jedi, is supposed to keep careful hold of, all the sorrow, all the loss, all the burning _grief_ , and feels tears trickling down his face. " _Please_ , Wanda."

She sighs. "I will come by," she says, and he knows that in this tone her words are a promise. "This evening. Make sure your house-mate doesn't notice."

* * *

 **xvi.**  
Pietro claims an early night, that his fight with the Crimson Witch had tired him and Barton waves him off to bed with a laughing, "Who's the old man now?"

Pietro settles in his room. Opens the window with a waved hand, locks the door behind him and sits, elbows on knees, hands clasped, chin on knuckles, at the edge of his bed. He hears Barton eventually rise from his seat, switch of screens and lock the door. There are the fainter noises of a shower and curtains pulled shut, and Pietro untenses.

He will wait all night if needs must, if only to see his sister.

* * *

 **xvii.**  
It is late, so late it is almost morning, when Wanda floats her way over the garden wall and through his window. She settles, silently, just before him, and Pietro looks up to her unmasked face and relaxes utterly with her presence.

"Pietro," she murmurs, and Pietro cannot stop the quiet noise of relief he makes at her voice wrapping around his name. "Oh, Pietro," she says, and she is kneeling, kneeling before him, her elbows on his knees, her face close to his, hands wrapped around his. His head tilts forward, their brows touch, and Pietro is almost undone.

Tears roll freely, and Wanda shushes softly, smooths them away with her thumbs, pulls him close and rests her head on his shoulder. He is crying, and he knows she is crying, can feel the sobbing shift of her shoulders, and pulls her closer even as she holds him tighter. "Oh, _Stars_ , Wanda, why didn't you tell me you were alive?" is croaked out, and she just shakes her head and presses her face closer into his neck.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so sorry." Pietro's hand runs over her hair, still the same dark and soft brown it ever has been. Her hands are in his hair, shot through with grey after all the grief though they are not yet twenty-two. "I should have," she murmurs, damply. "I wanted to. But they would have killed you, Ultron would have had you killed, if they knew my loyalty split like this."

Pietro holds her closer. "That's not your fault," he murmurs, and, "Stay with me, oh _Stars_ , Wanda, stay with me, _please_."

Her head is shaking again, and Pietro tries, with gentle hands, to still it. "I can't," she murmurs. "I can't leave Ultron now, he goes mad without us all there."

"Stay," he asks again. "Just for tonight. _Please,_ Wanda, it has been so long."

Wanda nods, and gently, oh so gently, pulls free of his embrace. The mask, he notices, is attached to her belt beside her lightsabre. She slips off her robe, sets it down over the chair and stretches down one side of Pietro's bed. Pietro half-smiles. "You can have the covers," he says and she shakes her head.

"Your bed," she says. "Besides I'll have to leave early."

Pietro sighs and slips beneath two covers, and pushes the third over Wanda. He can hear her huffed laugh, even as she switches off the lights and hides their faces in darkness. Pietro relaxes, and feels Wanda do the same, burrowing into his shoulder.

He sleeps, and it is the deepest sleep he has had in a long time.

* * *

 **xviii.**  
He wakes and Wanda is gone. There is a small note on the chair she'd hung her robe over ( _I will return_ ), but nothing else. Pietro still feels better than he has since before the Trials, and rises, stretches, smiles, and goes through to the main room to start making breakfast.

Barton is blinking and bleary when he comes through and sees Pietro so cheerful. "Sleep well then?" he asks and Pietro grins.

"Who's the old man now?"

Barton sits and digs in when Pietro sets a plate in front of him. "Me, it would seem." He wolfs down most of the plate before: "Any reason for the cheer?"

Pietro pauses and shrugs. "Fighting the Crimson Witch," he says, for it is not _exactly_ a lie. "It was a challenge. I haven't had a challenge like her since before the Trials."

Barton sets down cutlery on his empty plate with a clink. "Since your sister," he says, and Pietro turns. Barton nods. "I've read the file they sent of you. Look, whoever she is, even if she _is_ your sister- she's Sith now. And she _chose_ it. Don't get caught up in the joy of a good practice enough to let your guard down. Don't think you can turn her from the Dark. The Crimson Witch is not your friend."

Pietro's good mood fails. Barton does not know, Barton does not understand, and he cannot say _but she is my_ _ **sister**_. "I know," he says instead. "I saw her face under her mask, if that helps? Human, about my age. Dark hair, dark eyes."

His housemate looks slightly surprised and Pietro grins again. "You do washing up," he says. "I'll go into town."

* * *

 **xix.**  
He does not see Wanda that day, but he does that evening.

"Ultron," she explains. "He is building something, wanted my help."

"Do you know what it is?" he asks, but does not expect her to answer.

She shakes her head, dark hair still soft and long as it ever has been. "He keeps all of his plans close to his chest, and I'm not good enough with computers to break his code."

"Would you?" Pietro asks without thinking. "Would you, if you thought he might hurt us?"

Wanda's hand finds his an squeezes gently. "Yes. Without question. I am Sith now. Betrayal-"

"Is the way of the Sith." Pietro almost wants to be sad at how easily she says it, but cannot be. She would still put them first. She could still come back to him. She could still be Jedi. He presses a kiss to her hair where she is curled against him and sighs softly. It is easy to slip into sleep with his sister beside him.

* * *

 **xx.**  
They do this most nights. Not all. Sometimes Pietro is passed a message when in town, by a Togruta or a Bothan or a Rainer, saying " _I cannot. I am needed_." But she is always there the next day, or the day after. Pietro knows her, knows her like he does his bones and skin and self, for she is still his sister. Still as close to half of him as two separate people can be.

One night they are woken by Barton stumbling through the main room and Pietro hisses to Wanda " _Hide_ " just before Barton comes in. Barton sees her there and calls his bow to him. Pietro pushes his sister behind him.

"Pietro, move. She's Sith."

Pietro shakes his head. "She is my _sister_ ," he says. Then, "She's my _twin_."

Barton sighs and lowers his bow. Scrubs his hand over his face. "It's too late for this," he mumbles, and waves them through to the next room. Pietro is careful to grab his sabre as they go, and notes that Wanda does the same.

"Technically," Wanda says as they go through, "It's too early. It's only three hours until dawn."

Barton flaps a hand at her, "Hush up, blabbermouth. Sith or not. Too late, too early. Need caffeine." He bustles about, making tea, and puts out a mug for Pietro when he nods. Wanda shakes her head when offered, mouth thinned into a fine line.

"Why…," Pietro paused. "Barton why did you come through?"

Barton shrugs. "Had a dream I was a sandwich, wanted to ask if there were loaves of bread that big." Pietro almost glares. "Woke up and saw your window was open," Barton says. "One of the guys in town said they'd seen the Witch about, wanted to make sure you were ok."

Pietro gestures to himself, "As you can see, I am."

Barton points vehemently at him with a teaspoon, "You were in bed with a _Sith_."

"With my _sister_ ," Pietro says and then, "… That sounds just as bad, doesn't it."

Barton almost smiles and pushes the second mug towards Pietro. "It does. Explain yourself. Both of you explain yourselves."

It is simple enough for Pietro to start, cradling his warm mug in his hands. "I thought she was _dead_ ," he says.

Barton puts the kettle back on.

* * *

 **xxi.**  
By the time they are done Wanda has her own mug (well, Pietro's mug, and Pietro has a new one), and Barton seems almost comfortable with Pietro's Sith sister sat beside them on the sofas.

"Let me get this straight," Barton says. "Your sister was failed on the Trials, and left to become a Sith. You both have horrible nightmares, until she gets here and actually has a place of her own. Almost a year later you are sent here, and discover your sister is the Crimson Witch. You _somehow_ don't duel to the death and instead agree to meet again, and have been sleeping together - but only sleeping - pretty much every night since. Did I miss anything?"

"Only one thing," Wanda says, "But it's easy enough to do. I've learned that Ultron plans to destroy the planet."

* * *

 **xxii.**  
Pietro is certain that Barton is as stunned as he is when Wanda says _that_. "Wanda," he breathes, "When did you learn that?"

"Today," Wanda says, and her eyes meet his and Pietro can see _honesty honesty honesty truth_ all the way down their depths. "I was going to tell you in the morning, so you could tell him," she nods to Barton, "and call in whoever could stop it. Ultron's mad, Pietro, and not powermad like most Sith. He's almost omnicidal."

Barton finally gets his brain back online and sets his mug down without shaking. "How?" he asks. "How is he going to do it?"

Wanda pauses, glances to Pietro. Pietro looks at his sister and silently begs her to speak. _You could come back with me if you do this, come home, come home, be safe with me_. Pietro knows Wanda can hear the song of his mind and takes his hand.

"Novi Grad," she says. "The moon colony. He's going to rip it from it's orbit when Sokovi comes close by in three weeks and crash it into Strucker. He's been building a Force Maximiser that allows him to channel it through all his apprentices as well as himself, and he'll have one of us on the moon to act as a conduit." Her hand clenches around Pietro's. "He was furious when Ulysses - Ulysses Klaue - was killed. He was going to use him as the conduit. Now," she swallowed. "Now he wants to use me."

* * *

 **xxiii.**  
Pietro's hand is so tight around his sister's that he fears he would break her bones were she not holding his hand just as tightly. Barton looks stunned, and pulls a tablet towards himself, starts tapping out equations.

"Doing that…," he says, muttering half to himself. "To _do_ that… The conduit would be _killed_ , if not by the process then by the impact. And crashing NG into Strucker… he'll kill _everyone_. On both of them, Mother of Moons, he's _insane_."

Pietro tugs Wanda's chin up, gently gently, from where she is looking at the tiles of the floor. "You were going to go back to him?" he asks, and he knows that what Wanda is seeing in his eyes is _betrayal betrayal betrayal, how could you, how_ _ **could**_ _you?_

Her thumb strokes over his hand. "I am Sith now," she says. "Betrayal-"

"Betrayal is the way of the Sith," Pietro says, and bows his brow to hers. "Come back to me," he whispers. " _Please_. I could not live without you again."

Wanda shifts her head, rubs her cheek against his. "Betrayal is the way of the Sith," she says. "I was going to betray _him_."

* * *

 **xxiv.**  
Pietro feels joy as intense as the shining sun, a sun about to go nova and illuminate everything in its range, and he knows Wanda can feel it emanating from his mind in wave after silver-gold wave of _joy._ Behind it, as deep and blue as the oceans of Mon Cala, is _mine, my sister, my wonderful sister, Wanda is safe and home and_ **good** _again, she is herself she is_ _ **right**_ and Pietro hears her chuckle when she receives that.

"We need a way to stop him," Wanda says. "To destroy the Maximiser, kill him, kill his apprentices or get the ones like Cho who don't want to be here away. I don't know how we can but we _have_ to, or-"

"Or everyone here dies," Barton says. "Crimso- Wanda. You should head back. Tell us how the Maximiser works, if there's any weaknesses in Ultron's defence, if there's a way we can counter the pull on NG to keep it in place and prevent this that way. Can you do that?"

There is something intense in Barton's gaze, something only there when he was teaching Pietro to shoot, and when he held them both at arrowpoint. Wanda nods. "Pietro and I will start working on viruses for the Maximiser, and get the Council in on this," Barton continues. "They need to know." Wanda nods again and squeezes Pietro's hand.

"I should go now," she says. "The more ready I am at Ultron's side the more he will believe me." Pietro nods as she rises, and lets her hand slip from his. There is silence in the main room as she takes her outer robe from the chair, and the soft noise of wind as she floats out the window and over the wall.

"Pietro," Barton says, and his eyes still have the strange intensity. "You know she may not-"

"She will come back," Pietro says. "Even now she will not lie to me. She will come back."

"Betraya-"

"I know the saying," Pietro says, and stands. "But she won't betray _me_."

* * *

 **xxv.**  
The day finally comes and Wanda leaves in the morning with the virus they have designed. She has managed to convince Ultron, at the last moment, to send Jocasta and her sister instead of herself, convinced him that two on Novi Grad will increase the strength of the Force by a significant enough amount to ensure the wipe-out he seeks. Now Wanda's only job is preventing the Maximiser getting online.

Pietro and Barton follow as close to the base as they dare, pausing when Wanda's slight movement indicates they are as close as is safe. They watch her enter, and Pietro settles by a rock and _listens_ with his mind for hers. She has just slipped the chip with the virus on it into the Maximiser when the odd voice of Ultron asks, "Wanda?" and almost makes him jump out of his skin. He had not known the Sith knew his sisters name, and he feels his joy curdle into _worry worry worry_ gnawing its way out of the edges of his mind.

"Sir!" she says, brightly, and Pietro _hopes hopes hopes_ \- "Last minute checks. You wanted the third fuse down checked again; I just replaced it."

The strange metal face almost… smiles? And Pietro can feel his sister's pulse slowing from its startled response. "Good," he says. "That's good. The others are already in harness, but we just caught trespassers at the boundary. Will you come and help me deal with them?" There is something almost cheerful in Ultron's tone and-

The image shatters as Barton pokes him in the ribs. "Pietro," he says. "We've been caught."

Over them stand two droids, weapons out, and Pietro knows that even with his speed, going for his sabre is suicide.

* * *

 **xxvi.**  
They are lead in, hands cuffed together, and Wanda is standing, mask on, beside Ultron. Pietro can feel her mind racing, racing faster, as fast as he fights and then… it withdraws. Pietro watches her inscrutable mask, and barely pays attention to Ultron until, "Should we kill them, do you think, or wait for them to die with the rest?"

He is looking to Wanda, with an odd kind of attentiveness, like a parent to a child. _Our parents are_ _ **dead**_ Pietro thinks, as loudly as he can, trying to get through to Wanda. _They were killed by_ **Sith**. He feels the least flutter from Wanda's mind, and one hand slips beneath her robe, toward her sabre.

"My Lord," Wanda says, smoothly, and Pietro's head bows. He looks to the floor. _Do not betray me, please, sister, do not betray me, please, Wanda, please please_ _ **please**_. "As you say, Death is a gift to those unable to advance beyond its bounds, for they would be lesser than those who would yet survive."

There is the screech of metal and the buzz of a lightsabre.

"But I will _never_ let you hurt my brother."

Pietro opens his eyes, sees Wanda stood, her lightsabre thrust through Ultron's chest, one hand holding… something, her thumb pressing a button, as droids in the room fall down and Ultron…

"Wanda," the droid-Sith says. "Wanda…?"

Wanda twists the lightsabre, pulls it up, pulls it to one side, and pulls it straight through Ultron. _Sai tok_ , Pietro remembers. The Sith Strike.

Ultron falls in two, upper and lower, and Wanda does not let go of the button in her hand until his eyes have faded.

"Wanda," Pietro breathes, and her hand rises to rip off her mask.

"Pietro," she says, and flies down the stairs, wraps him in her arms. It is with a flick of her fingers she undoes their cuffs and Pietro hugs her back, mind singing _Wandawandawandawandawanda, brave sister, beautiful sister,_ _ **wonderful**_ _sister,_ in the same silver-gold joy it had when she said she would betray Ultron. His mind is shining like a supernova, and all he cares for is his sister in his arms.

* * *

 **xxvii.**  
As Barton says later, it's a good thing that other apprentices - barring Jocasta and Alkhema - are trapped in harnesses. They offer them all a chance to turn back or face imprisonment and possible execution, and the apprentices are stuck tied up. Cho - Helen, Pietro learns her name is - wants nothing more than to go _home_ and forget she can access the power of the Force. List has war crimes listed against him from another planet, it turns out, and the others variously chose death and imprisonment. Jedi called by Barton wait on the edge of the system and catch the fleeing Jocasta and Alkhema, and Wanda stays with Pietro and Barton.

Pietro is surprised when Windu and Yoda visit, weeks after the event. Wanda has been staying with them, helping to guard the town, helping the people, living her life, and still with her bright red lightsabre at her side, and when the Jedi Masters come Pietro stays by her and refuses to move.

"We're not here to punish her," Windu says, but Pietro only stands closer. "Yoda," Windu tilts a bald head to the diminutive Jedi, "Wanted to assess how far to the Dark Side your sister had gone. After Barton's report we've decided she can't be as Dark as we'd feared. Misdirection and influence may be her forte, but betraying you and the Council? Much less so."

Pietro's grip on his sister's hand is fierce. " _I_ could have told you that. _Years_ ago, before you failed her Trials." Wanda's hand is soothing on his, thumb running over his skin.

"Shh," she murmurs. "They know _now_ , at least."

"Patience you have," Yoda says, looking at Wanda. "And anger too."

"But not enough," Windu says, "For the Dark Side."

Yoda nods. "A Jedi she can be," he says, and Pietro looks to his sister. She seems almost drifting and he tugs on her hand.

"Wanda?" he says.

"Y-you… You'll pass me on the Trials?" she asks, and Yoda smiles.

"By the Force you were passed," Yoda says, "And this your Trials were."

Wanda's laugh is joyful, and Pietro feels her mind shine like a supernova.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	10. Fic 9 - Prompt: Inhumanly Human

**Prompt: Inhumanly Human.**

 **Summary:** "You can come with us," the woman says. "If you would like?"

There are odd faint scars on her face, but her smile is gentle. Her hand reaches tentatively towards them, and Wanda glances up to Pietro before taking it. "Will we be safe?" she asks, and the woman nods.

"From the whole of the world."

 **Notes:** Agents of SHIELD/Inhumans AU.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.  
** They were found, after their home had been destroyed, by a man with no eyes, and a woman who was ageless. After three days choking on dust and worry the fresh air is beautiful and kind faces are a gift. They are curled together on a chair, as they have been since they were pulled free of the rubble, fingers interlinked, hands pressed together, shoulders touching.

"I'm Jiaying," the woman says. "I was a friend of your parents."

Pietro shifts, and sets his chin atop his sister's head. Wanda hunches closer to him, and watches the pair with dark eyes. "What happens now?" Wanda asks.

"You can come with us," the woman says. "If you would like?"

There are odd faint scars on her face, but her smile is gentle. Her hand reaches tentatively towards them, and Wanda glances up to Pietro before taking it. "Will we be safe?" she asks, and the woman nods.

"From the whole of the world."

* * *

 **ii.**  
They are taken to Afterlife through a twisting cloud of blue, warping through the world at the whim of the man without eyes. "My name is Gordon," he says, when they arrive. "Jiaying will show you to your rooms. Do you want me to get you pizza?"

Pietro nods even before Wanda does, and Gordon smiles, ruffles his hair, and vanishes off.

"Come along," Jiaying says. "I'll show you to your rooms."

* * *

 **iii.**  
Their rooms are spacious, with one bedroom and two beds. "We thought," Jiaying says, "That you would not want to be apart after what happened."

Pietro nods. Wanda, still holding his hand, smiles at Jiaying slightly. "Thank you."

Jiaying crouches before them, gently takes their free hands. "This is your home now," she says. "You will be safe here. You will be taught here. Tomorrow one of the others will come to show you around and introduce you to everyone else." She squeezes their hands gently. "Why don't you both go and get some rest?"

* * *

 **iv.**  
Afterlife is freeing. So much space, the gorgeous views, other children sometimes visiting, brought with their parents by Gordon and no one, no one at all, questions their closeness. It is like they already know what happened.

"They do," Gordon says one day, handing them a bag of sweets and pretzels for the film night the children were all having. "Jiaying told them. If no one is surprised by you it makes it easier for you to heal."

Wanda considers this, and nods. Her fingers loop smoothly around her brother's when they go to join the others.

* * *

 **v.**  
Sometimes other people stay at Afterlife, but they do not see them. "We help them," Jiaying says. "When you are older I will explain how, and you may have your chance."

So far, Wanda reminds Pietro, Jiaying has not lied to them. They wait for Jiaying to deem them old enough, and begin to pay attention to those who vanish for a few days in Afterlife.

Some of them, they conclude, must have powers like Gordon's.

* * *

 **vi.**  
They are sixteen when Jiaying calls them into her office.

"Do you remember," she says, "When you asked what happened to those who came here but were not seen?"

They nod together.

"You are old enough to know," she says, and offers them her hand. "Would you like to come and see?"

* * *

 **vii.**  
The room they are led to is deep within Afterlife, and there are older people there. One of them raises an eyebrow when Jiaying leads them in and she speaks quietly to them.

"They were raised here, but not aware of it all. When they asked I thought they should witness it."

Wanda and Pietro stand close to the door, holding each other's hands tightly. Pietro is glancing towards the window, constantly, wanting to see. Wanda is watching Jiaying, and when the woman glances back to them, smiles and nods, she walks with Pietro to look through the window.

In a red room a woman waits. There is a bed to one side, and a table. On the table a bluish crystal rests and waits, and they do not notice Jiaying has left the room until they see her walk in to join the woman below.

"Hello Linda," she says. "Are you ready?"

The woman nods, and is passed the crystal. Jiaying held it wrapped in white cloth, but Linda picks it up with her bare fingers, and the twins watch in horror as grey stone begins to weave it's way over her hand.

Then she crushes it, and is encased.

* * *

 **viii.**  
The twins cannot help their gasp of shock, but Gordon is there and presses gentle hands to their shoulders. "Watch," he says. "She's quite alright."

And the twins watch in awe as the stone begins to crack, and crumbles down to the ground. Wanda looks up to Gordon. "Is that…?" she asks and Gordon nods.

"That's how I got my power. It's how Jiaying got hers. It's how Linda has gained hers, and how, one day, you may gain your own."

The twins watch as Jiaying embraces Linda, and the air lights up like fireflies around the two women.

* * *

 **ix.**  
"Do you think they'll let us?" Pietro asks. "Do that, become that?"

Wanda shrugs. "Maybe," she says. "Maybe not. But we've been raised here, and the others haven't. Maybe we have a better chance."

They still share a room, these years later. They observe privacy when one of them wants to change clothes, but they share their room still, and keep their beds at right angles so they can hold hands if they have nightmares. Now they sit, cross-legged, on their beds as they talk.

No one else is allowed in here with them. They have kept the room clean since the first morning they came back from playing to find one of the older people changing their bedsheets. ("I can do that," Pietro had said, and taken the sheet. "I _will_ do that.") Jiaying had asked if they were sure they were willing to take up the responsibility for their bedroom, and that was that. Even the other children were not let in, though the door was left open when they visited.

It was, the twins had decided, _their_ space, and not one they would share with anyone else.

* * *

 **x.**  
They are seventeen when Jiaying calls them to her office again.

"You are on the shortlist for those who may go through Terrigenesis this year. Of those on the list, only one will go through it." The twins stay silent. "If you had to chose, had to decide, which of you would go through the process?"

Pietro immediately says, "Wanda," even as Wanda says, "Neither of us."

Wanda takes her brother's hand and squeezes. "If I had to choose I'd say neither of us. I would not want to be left behind by Pietro, and would not want to leave him behind myself."

Jiaying's gaze goes to Pietro.

"Wanda should," he says. "Wanda should always come first."

Jiaying taps her fingertips on the sheet before her, and softly sends them away.

* * *

 **xi.**  
They have just turned eighteen when Jiaying calls them in again.

"I have decided," she says, "To make a small loophole in the rules. Siblings have gone through Terrigenesis together before, and acted as aids to one another. And with the world growing as it is we ought to grow also." The twins are silent. "You both will go through Terrigenesis this year."

* * *

 **xii.**  
Preparation is long and tiring. They read on what has happened before, run circuits through Afterlife so they are in best condition they can be. They are taken to the pools away from the buildings and told to swim or mediate or just relax, and to prepare for the most physically trying thing they could go through.

It is almost December when Jiaying invites them down to the red chamber, and asks them what she had asked Linda.

"Are you ready?"

Their hands are still clasped between them as they stretched out their free hands for the crystals Jiaying holds. They feel the stone playing over their skin, and wait for Jiaying's signal.

"It will be," she says, "Unlike anything else."

They break the crystal and the stone encases them.

* * *

 **xiii.**  
The stone encases them and they try not to breathe it in. This is like when they were ten, when their parents died and they were crushed beneath rubble and the only thing holding them together is the faint touch of their fingers between their cocoons. Wanda can feel her brother's pulse racing, faster faster faster until it is like a hummingbird's, and she tries to hold his hand tighter, to tell him _I am here_.

Then scarlet like blood fills her mind, and it's light bathes the room.

* * *

 **xiv.**  
Wanda is freed from her cocoon by the force of the blast, all but her hand still clasped tight around her brother's. In his cocoon time is passing faster and faster and faster, and she can feel his heart still racing faster. Her scarlet is lashing around her in agitation, tendrils stretching as far as they can reach in the room and she tries to reel them in.

"Pietro," she whispers. "Pietro, please."

The scarlet is twisting, slipping off the reel she tries to visualise it on, so she makes them vines and under her control. They clamber back towards her mind with each worried twitch of her fingers until all but one is safe away.

"Pietro," she whispers. "Come on, brother, _please_."

Jiaying is watching, she knows, but she does not care. She holds her brother's hand tighter even as it is half-cocooned, and the scarlet still around her wrist stretches up and through the stone, and finds Pietro's face. Wanda tries to pull it in, make it hers again, and then it slips through and _oh_

 _Pietro?_ she calls, and it is into a space of blue as bright as her brother's eyes. Silver wind fills it, swirling faster and faster and faster, and Wanda pours scarlet in, forces vines to grow to make it slow. _Pietro, are you there?_

 _Oh,_ a voice says. _That is what you were saying. Everything sounded so slow._

Wanda makes her vines grow more strongly, and has them pull the blue and the silver in to join them. _Does this help?_

There is the sound of the wind sighing, and Pietro's voice saying, _Oh so much_.

* * *

 **xv.**  
The stone around Pietro shatters, and Jiaying does not see the moment Pietro tugs his sister, before he is carrying her. He is laughing, she is smiling, and he runs a circuit of the room as a silver blur before he stops before her and sets his sister down. His hair is shot through with silver-white, though the roots stay dark, while Wanda is unchanged but for the scarlet dancing in her eyes. Jiaying opens her arms to them, and they fall into her embrace.

"Telekinesis and enhanced speed," she murmurs, smile audible in her voice. "What a pair you are."

Wanda squeezes her brother's hand, and Pietro says nothing of her voice in his mind.

* * *

 **xvi.**  
They spend several days in a room, needles in their skin. They ask to be set close enough to hold each other's hands and the medics, well used to them both, allow it. Wanda's scarlet is still a presence in Pietro's mind, and together they find out how many vines are needed for him to go as fast as he may without finding the world too slow.

 _Do you mind?_ she asks one evening, when the medics leave and there is only Gordon listening to an audiobook in the chairs beside them. _Do you mind me in your mind?_

Pietro's wind laughs. _I would never mind it. Without it I might have stayed in my cocoon forever._

* * *

 **xvii.**  
They have been mostly trained for several months when the jets arrive and bring normal humans to Afterlife. They are called to Jiaying's office and they have never seen her so close to ruffled. "Watch them," she says. "Humans hate that which is different, and we are more different than most. If they try to hurt anyone, get them to safety. Take them to Gordon and get them _out_. If Gordon and I aren't here, you _must_ keep them safe. Do you understand?"

The twins nod, and Wanda lets her scarlet, so thin it is almost invisible, slide past the lacquered walls of Jiaying's mind. _Monsters_ , it is snarling, loud enough for her to hear. _How_ _ **dare**_ _they defile this space?_

When they are outside Wanda's hand catches her brother's sleeve. "She has biases," she murmurs, and sends the memory of Jiaying's mind.

Pietro nods. "That doesn't mean we shouldn't get the others to safety."

Wanda's fingers slip into her brother's grip and gently squeeze as they walk towards where they others wait.

* * *

 **xviii**.  
When Daisy leaves them and Jiaying and Gordon vanish the twins watch the rest of Afterlife. They are too far from anywhere to get everyone out safely on their own, and not all of them have powers. They consider taking one of the jets remaining to watch them, filled with agents, or giving all unchanged a crystal to crush.

But that can be dangerous, and they were told to _protect_.

* * *

 **xix.**  
Eventually the agents offer to take them home. The grey-haired one, Coulson, and another agent promise safety and Wanda's scarlet bleeds through their minds and sees it true. When Jiaying had asked how she had known who to trust, back when they were training Wanda had shrugged and simply said, "I just _know_." Everyone learned she knew the truth when it was said, and follow her aboard the jets.

Coulson is in the front, beside the pilot, and when they are far enough out and the jet settled for flight he turns.

"They all followed you."

Wanda shrugs.

"Are you a leader of some kind?"

Another shrug. "I know when people lie to me. They followed me for that, not for anything else."

Coulson nods. "Is that your gift then? Lie-detection?"

Beside her Pietro is tense at the man's questioning and Wanda once more shrugs.

"You would be welcome to work with us," Coulson offers and the twins glare together.

"You destroyed our _home_ ," she says. "Our first destroyed by Stark, our second by S.H.I.E.L.D.. What makes you think I want to work with you at all?"

"Because," Coulson says, "We can keep your people safe. And that will be easier if someone they trust is working with us."

Wanda looks down the jet, at all the people, some clutching children, holding hands as tightly as she does Pietro's, and feels out the minds in the jets around them. That was their job, set by Jiaying, and she knows that to Pietro adding others to his mental circuit of _protect_ is little effort after all the years at Afterlife. Linda is there with them, sparks lighting the air around her as she looks distinctly green, and a levitator, a hydrokinetic, an object-moulder, a precog.

Coulson sees the look on her face and pauses. "I'll leave you time to think."

* * *

 **xx.**  
When they land they watch the others milling. The first flight only took them away from Afterlife, the next will take them home. The twins have no home to go to any longer.

"Pietro?" Wanda asks, and he nods.

"Let's," he says. "I think we will surprise them enough."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	11. Fic 10 - Prompt: Beg our forgiveness

**Prompt: Beg Our Forgiveness**

 **Summary:** Magic protects them from one mad dictator, but it cannot protect them from the other.

 **Notes:** This is _not_ the same HP AU as _To Share A Soul_ , and though this has a sequel it is also an unconnected universe.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Disillusionment, Imprisonment.

* * *

 **i.**  
They are fortunate enough that their magic protects them from one dictator, but not so fortunate that it might protect them from another. Sokovia is a small country, and not one well armed, and when Grindlewald's forces come in the night their spells eat through whatever enchantments have been set to protect them. Muggles and magicals alike, they are taken.

Wanda sees their mother's head clubbed in and bleeding from a levitated piece of rubble, their father limp on the floor after a single strike of green, and only Pietro's arms around her keep her from screaming.

* * *

 **ii.**  
They are taken to Schloss Grimmshel and Wanda can feel the angry humming magic in the walls. "Twins," says one of the wizards with surprise and points towards a cell. "Leave them together," he says.

They are glad of that, and cling closely together.

* * *

 **iii.**  
Some days they get food. Some days they don't. Some days they are taken away, given potions or subjected to spells and other days they are assigned work to do, and yet other days they are sent back to their cell and given nothing to do. They huddle together in the corner by the door where they cannot be seen and do not let go of each other.

* * *

 **iv.**  
"What do you think they're trying to do?" Pietro asks Wanda one evening. "There's no rhyme or reason to it, they just _do_ things. Today it was a concoction of Billywig Stings, Re'em blood and ginger root, tomorrow it will be Veela blood and Scarab shells and Ashwinder eggshell. What are they trying to _do?"_

Wanda takes her brother's hand and holds it tight. "I think they're doing it because they _can_."

* * *

 **v.**  
Wanda learns how to do things with magic even without a wand. How to pick the lock on the door, and undo their locking charms, and how to warm them both when it is cold. Pietro is content to tie all his magic into his body and never let it out as it heals his broken bones and makes stronger his skin and quicker his responses. Some days they wonder if Grindlewald realises that as well as weapons to help him, and prisoners rendered mad or dead he is crafting weapons which would gladly kill him.

* * *

 **vi.**  
They are seventeen when the war is done, and have never touched a wand. One called Dumbledore with auburn hair and beard and bright purple robe strides down the corridor, striking open doors as it pleases him.

"It's all right now," he says, smiling at them his eyes twinkling. "Everything shall be well again."

Wanda wants to _spit_.

* * *

 **vii.**  
"Why did he take so long?" Pietro asks and Wanda shrugs. "He knew. The _world_ knew what he was doing, and Dumbledore could have stopped and…." He draws a breath. " _Years_ , Wanda, and how many deaths?"

"Almost a million from Grindlewald," Wanda whispers. "Many millions from the muggle."

Pietro looks disgusted and Wanda cannot disagree. "And he is hailed as hero. _We_ are heroes. _We_ survived his friend's terror. All he did was saunter in at the end."

"If there is a God," Wanda whispers, "He will have to beg for our forgiveness."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	12. Fic 11 - Prompt: Ave in perpetuum frater

**Prompt: Ave in perpetuum frater.**

 **Summary:** Wanda mourns when her brother dies, but doesn't know what more to do. They have always had each other, were born together, but he was killed by a maniac with a gun and so she continues on alone. She goes, each day, to his grave ( _Pietro Maximoff, 1990-2009,_ in perpetuum frater ave atque vale) and waits and watches.

Please, she prays. Please come back, Pietro.

 **Notes:** An _In The Flesh_ AU. The quote on Pietro's grave is from Catullus 101 and translates to "forever, brother, hail and farewell". I bastardised it slightly for the fic title, making it approximately "forever, my brother, hail". In The Flesh has the Zombie rising occurring in 2009, and only of those who died in that year. I've moved this to Britain because A) I know Britain better as I live here and B) In The Flesh is set in Britain and so I know more of the systems set up in ITF's Britain. The number I picked for Pietro has nothing to do with Magneto's number in comics, it's in fact the date it would have been when Wanda brought Pietro in, plus an additional number to indicate which he was that day, as either of the numbers given in comics would be too much at that point of the ITF timeline. Because the series ended and Amy seemed to [SPOILER] have become Living again, I've decided the Second Rising did happen, in that PDS sufferers began to become human as (possibly) hinted at by Kieran's symptoms. Amy died towards the end of 2013, hence 2014 for the time it becomes noticed. You can find the _In The Flesh_ timeline if you go to where I posted this on AO3, it's linked in the Notes there.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Zombies, Brains.

* * *

 **i.**  
Wanda mourns when her brother dies, but doesn't know what more to do. They have always had each other, were born together, but he was killed by a maniac with a gun and so she continues on alone. She goes, each day, to his grave ( _Pietro Maximoff, 1990-2009,_ in perpetuum frater ave atque vale) and waits and watches.

 _Please_ , she prays. _Please come back, Pietro._

Some days it is raining, some days it is not, and some days she falls half-asleep at the foot of her brother's grave. Even at home their foster parents think it is far too much for her to grieve her brother so strongly, but she cannot make herself care at all with her brother in the ground.

* * *

 **ii.  
** She is dozing by the foot of his grave late on the 19th of December. It is freezing cold, and there is a touch of snow. Darkness is gathering and Wanda looks towards the lights at the gate. She sighs and rises and walks back home.

Her dreams that night are confused, and only made worse when she goes to her brother's grave the next day to find it torn up and empty.

* * *

 **iii.**  
ROTTERS scream the wild ones, ZOMBIES scream the net. _Pietro_ thinks Wanda, and starts to search. She takes a shovel from the shed and a coil of synthetic rope and heads back to the graveyard to _look_.

 _Brother-mine, brother-mine, where did you_ _ **go?**_

She finds his footprints and follows them to the woods. It is harder through the woods, but she finds black-stained drips on leaves and follows them to the field just outside of town.

There is a sheep, it's skull cracked open, and _her brother_ crouched by it, sucking out the brains.

* * *

 **iv.**  
She is too stunned to move at first, but is silent. _Oh, Pietro_ , she thinks and does not move. Her brother is not paying attention to anything but the brains before him. Mud is matted in his hair, and his skin looks almost grey-green and it is _him_.

Wanda remembers what the news reports have said. That the Risen do not recognise people, only attack. That the Risen can kill and will kill and are dangerous. The the Government wants specimens to examine, and, hopefully, cure.

Wanda does not know if they can cure this, but knows that she will do anything to have her brother back.

She steps out from behind the trees and bushes and calls, "Pietro?"

* * *

 **v.**  
She manages to knock him out and tie him but does not know where to go next. Back to town? The trains are running yet, but she doesn't know if she'd be allowed on hauling her un-deceased brother with her. To the police, or to the fire brigade down by the river? Or to the outpost set up outside the post office? She decides the lattermost and starts walking, half-carrying her brother beside her.

* * *

 **vi.**  
The streets clear before her and her brother stirs as she goes to knock on the door. People shift uncertainly in the street, and, _finally_ the door swings open. Wanda almost smiles at the man's stunned face.

"I've caught one," she says. "I've caught my brother. I want to contact that government number for captured Risen."

* * *

 **vii.**  
The number doesn't go through immediately, but rings clearly on the second go. Pietro has been retied into a chair, legs bound, arms bound, body bound, pale eyes watching everything with an eerie empty intensity. The number goes through and Wanda is almost tripping over herself to speak before the woman at the other end.

"I'm Wanda, Wanda Maximoff, in Mistley, Essex. I caught a Risen, my brother."

The lady sounds almost surprised at the rush of information. "Well," she says slowly. "As I'm sure you know there is a reward for uninjured Risen being turned in to the government, and that we mean to study them in order to treat them. If you give me your current address we will send a response team to pick up the Risen-"

"My _brother_ ," Wanda interrupts, and she refuses to give in on this. "I'm outside Mistley Post Office, at the outpost you set up on the old turn off to the quay. I'll hand him over, but I want to come too."

The woman sputters, "I'm sorry, what-"

"I want to go with my brother. I want to help with the studies."

"I-I-"

Wanda pauses, sighs, scrubs a hand over her face. "Get your superior," she says, gentler. "But I want to help my brother, so I want to go with him to where ever you mean to take him."

There is silence from the other end for long minutes and then a soft clatter.

"Hello?" The woman says.

Wanda breathes out. "I'm still here."

"They say yes. The team will be with you in a matter of hours. If the Risen-"

"My _brother_."

"If your brother is correctly restrained we advise you pack what you wish to take with you and wait with him."

A wave of relief rushes through Wanda. " _Thank you_ ," she says, and means it entirely. "Thank you so much."

* * *

 **viii.**  
The team that arrives is gruff and almost brutal, and Wanda frowns at them cautiously manhandling Pietro into the back of the truck. She sighs, throws her bag in, and takes Pietro's tied arm.

"Let me," she says, and tugs her brother forward. His eyes, so pale, so inhuman, watch her closely, and she watches back. "Come on," she says softly. "Come on in. It's going to be alright."

It is not too difficult to get her brother into the truck and settled on a seat. She quickly ties him to the round bar behind him, and makes sure he is as secure as she can make him before sitting beside him.

"He's safe," she says to the team, and they get going.

* * *

 **ix.**  
They go all the way to Norfolk, and Wanda watches the empty fens stretching out and out and out behind the truck. It's so flat she can see for what she is almost certain is miles, and it is easy to pick out the shambling form of Risen against the cloudy sky.

* * *

 **x.**  
They give her a room at the facility, not far from the orderlies, and give her a run down of what they expect her to do if she wants to stay and keep an eye on her brother. Wanda makes a mental list and gets into uniform. At the end of her tour around the space she will be working in she finally asks, "When will I be allowed to see my brother?"

The doctor blinks. "Your… brother. Risen #221209-2?"

"Pietro," Wanda says. "Pietro Maximoff. My brother."

The doctor checks a chart and nods. "You will be able to see Risen #221209-2 on your rounds, though we advise you have other orderlies to help you restrain it before trying to interact."

* * *

 **xi.**  
Wanda checks on her brother every chance she gets. As soon as her jobs are done she goes to check on him in the cell with the others, goes to ensure he hasn't been hurt, that he is well. He doesn't seem to recognise her, no matter how many times she visits, but she will not give up.

* * *

 **xii.**  
Wanda spends her evening reading science books in the chamber off the cell in the evenings, and trying to understand how her brother seems to _live_. The doctors refuse to explain anything - or, Wanda thinks, they _can't_ \- so she is left to study it herself and try to comprehend the reasoning the world has used to resurrect a years worth of the dead.

* * *

 **xiii.**  
It is not until early 2012 that a treatment finally works - the doctors call it Neurotriptyline and Wanda thinks the name sounds pompous - and she is told her brother has been moved to a new cell, a separate cell, and that he has started to pick up words.

Wanda has to stop herself chewing her thumbnail down to a stub as she paces outside it. Eventually she knocks, and opens it. There are no other orderlies around, and she knows, if her brother is being treated and that it is working, he will not hurt her.

"Pietro?" she says, softly, and from the bedroll in the corner her brother turns. He looks less green now, more grey, with dark veins sluggish under his skin. His eyes still have that strange blank intensity, but she sees him blink at her.

"Wan-da," he says and she cannot help but smile.

"It's me," she says. "I'm here."

Her brother's mouth works, but no words come out. Wanda stretches out a careful hand. "Are you alright?"

He nods and stretches one hand out towards her. His skin is cold against hers, and there is no pulse still when she touches fingertips to his pulsepoint.

"What do you remember?"

Pietro tilts his head, shrugs. "Words," he says, slowly, almost tasting it as he speaks. "Some. Words." He pauses, tries to find the words, frowns and makes a face and tries again. " _Fuck_ ," he says emphatically, "Fuck words." And then, "Difficult."

Wanda smiles slightly, squeezes his hand. Pietro doesn't react. "How well can you think?"

Pietro pauses, tilts his head, finds the words. "Well," he says. "Well enough."

* * *

 **xiv.**  
Wanda visits every day she can, and listens as his words return. One day he almost lunges for her, and for a moment, just a moment she is scared, before his arms wrap around her in a hug. Wanda sighs, relaxes, hugs him back, and tries to keep back tears.

"I've missed you," she says. "I've missed you so much."

* * *

 **xv.**  
When her brother is finally allowed out, allowed home, Wanda is glowingly pleased. Even as she signs Non-Disclosure forms in triplicate, promising not to reveal what she witnessed at the treatment centre, she is smiling, humming, and one hand holds her brother's in a comforting reminder.

"Everything is going to be alright now," she promises Pietro as their foster parents come to pick them up, and she feels the comforting weight of her brother's head on her shoulder.

* * *

 **xvi.**  
The first night Pietro has nightmares. Wanda goes through to his room and sits with him and wishes she could offer him a glass of water or _something_ , but PDS can't eat or drink like the Living can. Wanda sits beside him and holds his hand as tight as possible so he can feel it and offers to listen if he wants to talk.

Pietro shakes his head and holds her hand tighter.

* * *

 **xvii.**  
That first night they fall asleep curled around each other on Pietro's bed, and when Wanda asks in the morning he promises he had no more nightmares. She gives him his dose of Neurotriptyline, and eats quickly, refusing to make a comment on the difference. Her brother is PDS now, and she is still Living, but they are _twins_ and nothing will change that.

It is with a shambling speed Pietro follows her through town, down to the market. He helps her pick out the foods she likes, even knowing he cannot eat himself, and the things in the fosters' list. A few people eye him warily, and Wanda watches them back until they drop the stares.

When they arrive home and drop off the groceries Wanda offers to walk with Pietro through the woods, or take him into town, or even just in to the library.

"Anything," she offers. Pietro's smile is gentle, and they walk through the woods, Wanda catching Pietro at every pothole.

* * *

 **xviii.**  
It is not until early 2014 they truly hear anything about the murmured rumours of a Second Rising. Across the country, they hear, PDS are becoming Living again. Wanda has known of Pietro's shakes and tremors and his headaches, and how he has begun to feel again, feel properly since they started, but they had worried it was the Neurotriptyline failing.

That he might Live again is a new kind of hope and joy, and one that makes them both smile with it.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	13. Fic 12 - Prompt: To Build Again

**Prompt: To Build Again.**

 **Summary:** After leaving HYDRA and tracking down those who'd fought at the Triskhelion, it is all Wanda and Pietro can do to try to regain the memories they have lost as they help new friends find one just as lost as they.

 **Notes:** A sequel to _Prompt: And all their world come crashing down._

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Past (Unwitting) Incest, Regaining memories.

* * *

 **i.**  
Not all of their memories are clear. Even with Wanda's scarlet snaking through their minds and pulling old images up from beneath the barren sands, they lack the context required to understand half of them, and frustrates them both. Wanda combs through her mind every night, finding more memories to fit into the web of their missing past, and when Pietro wakes to find her sleepless he invites her to do the same in his.

"Some memories may be easier to find in my mind," he says, "or may add to what yours already say."

Wanda smiles, and strokes his face with fingers and dancing scarlet, sending memories down the bridge between them. _I've woven a little more together today_ , she sends. _Let's see if that calls up anything for you._

* * *

 **ii.**  
They still curl close when the time comes to sleep. Immediately after the battle in motels, later in the small flat when they track down Rogers and Romanoff and Wilson, out in the safehouses when Rogers agrees to let them help search out HYDRA. They may not have known they were twins before, but they do now, and while they will not be lovers again they still go to one another first for comfort.

They have not told the others their bond yet, and do not know if they will. It is easier as it is, to simply be Wanda and Pietro and close in a way it is up to them to interpret.

* * *

 **iii.**  
"We know him," Wanda says one day, when Rogers is looking over surveillance photographs.

"Bucky?" He says, and Wanda thinks she sees hope in his eyes. "You've spoken to him?"

Wanda shakes her head, "We worked with him during one of the attacks, before we regained our memories. They call him the Asset. If their programming is in place they'll have him. If not they trained him well enough in concealment he'll be hard to find."

Rogers is quiet for a while and then, "Programming?"

It's Pietro who speaks. "He's like us," he says, "Only worse. No memory, no information they haven't given him. They've done it so much he's almost childlike when without orders, and only an attack dog with them."

Rogers' face looks pained, and they leave him to his surveillance.

* * *

 **iv.**  
 _I think_ , Wanda sends one evening, _I've found where we were from._ A flurry of memories comes down the bridge between their minds, linked in to memories they've already recovered. Signs and posters and great board with words in the Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic, reading out _Novi Grad_.

Pietro sends a soft swirl of laughing wind. _There are many Novi Grads._

Wanda pushes the image of the board at him again. _Look closer. The map, the coat of arms and beneath it…_

 _Sokovia_ , Pietro says, and then, _Wanda-_ and a flurry of memories.

Wanda sends scarlet in a smile and the memories the names and his memories have brought back for her. _We're getting there_ , she says, and in the world outside their two minds she strokes her fingers through his hair. _We're getting there._

* * *

 **v.**  
Sometimes Wanda remembers what happened in the Battle over the Potomac, and the Battle in the Triskelion through memories that are not hers. As she'd gone darting through minds, ripping apart those of HYDRA she had absorbed parts of them, and echoes of their thoughts and their deaths still haunt her. Pietro is always there when she wakes, reaching across the gap between their beds to take her hand, to pull her close.

"Do you think," Wanda whispers after a particularly bad nightmare, "We did the right thing that day?"

Pietro shrugs and holds her closer. "We did better than HYDRA," he says, and it is settled.

* * *

 **vi.**  
There are many dead ends in the search for Rogers' Bucky, the one they know as the Asset, but Rogers never gives up.

"Are you sure he is still…" Wanda does not say _alive_ , but Rogers fills the gap.

"I know he is," he says. "The same way you would know if it was Pietro we were searching for."

Wanda bites her lip and nods.

* * *

 **vii.**  
"I found it," Pietro says one evening, after tapping away at the computer.

"Hmm?"

"Where we grew up," he says. "Where we trained. Where they wiped our minds." He is quiet a moment. "I think I've found our surname."

Pietro shows her the screen and in Wanda's mind a scarlet cascade breaks free.

* * *

 **viii.**  
 _Maximoff_ springs out from the news article, and the block of flats they had lived in, and the castle on the edge of the city. Memories spring up, flying from the spray of the scarlet wave, and walk her up to the castle, through the gates, to cells and gyms and a doctors office with a gold-and-blue staff and a room, deep deep beneath it all, with a chair of blinding pain and blank memories.

 _You found it_ , Wanda says, and she is not entirely sure if it is mind or body which does. Pietro's arm loops around her waist where she stands, and her hand touches his shoulder. _Thank you_ , she sends, and then, _Want to see?_

Pietro's eyes are bright and blue as she nods, and she lets her scarlet flood into his mind.

* * *

 **ix.**  
"We've found it," Pietro says the next morning at breakfast. "Where we were trained, where they kept the sceptre and gave us our powers." They have not told the others of the full extent of Wanda's gifts, that she can enter minds and stir them up, but they knew they both recalled enough to research.

"Where?" Rogers asks, and, "The sceptre?" from Natasha.

"Good on you," says Sam. "Where is it?"

"Sokovia," Wanda says. "The city of Novi Grad, the castle just outside. It's a HYDRA base and where they kept the sceptre. The city was going to hell and they used that to recruit people. To recruit us."

Rogers blinks at Natasha, and Natasha lifts a phone, leaves the table. "I'll call Fury," she says, "And the others."

"You're certain?" Rogers asks, and Wanda's hand tightens around her brother's.

"Memories found the city. Research found our name." Wanda lets out a deep breath, and lets scarlet dart around her fingertips, start stretching towards their skulls. "Do you trust me?"

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	14. Fic 13 - Prompt: Opposites

**Prompt: Opposites.**

 **Summary:** Pietro's blue is a darting thing, weaving through the air around them. His eyes shine with it when he focusses on an especially difficult trick, and he delights in teasing Wanda with it, tugging her shawl this way and that, or gently pulling on her hair.

Wanda's speed is red, like a thread of silk behind her, and it has darkened her hair, brought out the red like father's had been in photographs, before he had gone so grey.

 **Notes:** The twins have the other's powers.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.**  
Pietro's blue is a darting thing, weaving through the air around them. His eyes shine with it when he focusses on an especially difficult trick, and he delights in teasing Wanda with it, tugging her shawl this way and that, or gently pulling on her hair.

Wanda's speed is red, like a thread of silk behind her, and it has darkened her hair, brought out the red like father's had been in photographs, before he had gone so grey. Before he had died. The speed makes it hard for Wanda to concentrate, everything around her slow, and her mind so fast, so Pietro anchors it with ropes of blue, branches from the tree of his mind growing into hers and holding it in place.

 _I would have thought_ , Pietro sends one evening, _This to be your power, and yours mine_. But it is not so, and Wanda flicks his ear gently with her speed and they laugh.

* * *

 **ii.**  
Pietro still tries to protect her, now her speed sends her spinning faster than he can keep up, and outside the reach of his bright bright blue. _You don't need to_ , Wanda sends down their bridge. _Nothing can catch me now_. Wanda can feel her brother's sigh.

 _Bullets,_ he sends. _One almost nicked you. I_ **always** _notice when something almost hurt you, you know that._

Wanda shrugs. _I will dodge them_ , she promises. _And I will watch for them, and I promise I will get faster._

Pietro tugs her to him and presses a kiss to her blood-brown hair. _Do,_ he sends. _I don't know what I would do if you were hurt._ Wanda's chuckle is clear in both mind and air.

 _Hurt them back?_

Pietro nuzzles at her hair. _Yes_ , he sends. _Or let you do it if you could. You are much more inventive than me._

* * *

 **iii.**  
Training is hard, and Pietro hates the day they test to see if they can use their gifts to heal. It is not easy for him to knit flesh back together with his power, but he can hold a wound shut while a doctor sews it up so there is that. Wanda's speed heals scratches and cuts in moments, and broken bones in a matter of minutes.

He cannot help but hate how they test for that.

* * *

 **iv.**  
 _I_ _ **hate**_ _them_ , Pietro sends that evening, curled around Wanda like a shield. Her hand is still broken - for the twentieth time that day - but it is healing painfully now, and he presses the lightest of kisses to her fingers.

Wanda's uninjured hand strokes down his face. _I'll heal,_ she sends, _and then we'll be strong enough to kill Stark. That is all we need them for._

Pietro nuzzles gently into her touch, and holds her closer.

* * *

 **v.**  
When the Avengers come to bring their fight it is Pietro who wants to run and fight, and send his blue startling into each of them. It is Wanda who holds him back, holds him back until she sees the quiet discussion of Strucker and List, and runs with him into the woods.

 _Can you carry me that long?_ he asks and Wanda shifts her grip.

 _We can switch to piggy back if this is too tiring_ , she sends, _but the speed has given me strength enough to carry you, I think._

She watches him send blue to catch an arrow and fling it back towards the archer, before a fallen comm sends them tearing back.

 _Stark_ , Pietro thinks, _In_ _ **here**_ _, Wanda we can-_

 _Hurt him_ , Wanda thinks, and sets her brother in the shadows of the room.

Pietro reaches a hand out, blue playing around his fingertips and then-

 _Or_ , he sends. _Wanda, remember the fear training?_ There is a blink of scarlet in his mind and Pietro smiles. _Do you remember how you suggested making nightmares?_ he says, and twists his fingers.

* * *

 **vi.  
** _Look_ , Pietro sends. _Oh, Wanda,_ _ **look**_ , and he tugs her down their bond to watch Stark's mind take fear and make a thought wholly nightmare. Beside him Wanda is smiling, her thoughtform's hand in his.

 _Let him take it_ , she thinks. _With it's power and his nightmare…_

The realisation rises in Pietro's mind in a wave of cerulean, _He will destroy himself_. His blue makes a dancing smile around them, and Wanda's scarlet weaves through. _Oh, that will be_ **wonderful**.

* * *

 **vii.**  
When Stark takes the sceptre Wanda's hand tightens around her brother's. "To town," she whispers, and Pietro nods. They are gone in a wave of scarlet, and find shelter amongst the crumbling ruins at the edge of the city.

"What now?" Pietro asks. "Do you want to stay here? Go somewhere else?"

Wanda smiles. "You can chose too. But I would like to help the city."

Pietro's hand is warm around hers. "We help the city then."

* * *

 **viii.**  
When word comes of an iron man staying in the church, they do not know what to believe. _I go first_ , sends Pietro.

 _No, I do_ , sends Wanda. _I am faster, I can get us out sooner_.

 _I protect_ _ **you**_ _,_ Pietro insists, and Wanda's hand closes around his.

 _Not anymore_ , she says. _I go first. Tell me if you feel Stark's mind_.

Wanda runs them to the church, and in her arms Pietro shakes his head. _No one there_ , he sends.

Wanda sets him down outside, and runs in herself, a quick circuit and back out.

"Pietro," she says. "You _have_ to see this."

* * *

 **viii.**  
The man is made of metal, yes, but not the garish red and glistening gold of Stark's armour. He is, he says, Ultron, and wishes to destroy the Avengers. Pietro's hand in Wanda's is clenched tight and trembling, and Wanda is wary still.

 _Should we?_ He asks, and Wanda nods.

 _We may never have this chance again._

* * *

 **ix.**  
It is not pleasant working with Ultron, but his chatter is a simple enough distraction, and Wanda does not mind stretching her speed faster and faster as Pietro's blue dances around them. Some evenings Pietro seems tired after going into other minds, and Wanda sits with him, lets him rest his head in her lap and combs her fingers through his hair.

"Are you alright?" she asks, and keeps her voice soft. Mind-to-mind after so much work could cause a headache, and she would not wish that on him now.

Pietro smiles and stretches his hand up to touch her cheek. _I'll be fine. Just. Every mind with so much_ _ **noise**_ _._ He sends memories of them, loud and chattering or chirping like birds, or barking like dogs, or the sound of the streets filled with cars and children and riots and police. _I wish they were as quiet as yours_.

Wanda bends, and presses a kiss to her brother's brow. _You are always welcome in mine._

* * *

 **x.**  
Klaue is annoying, but the _Avengers_ , they are something else, and Wanda does not mind this fight, knowing that it pits her against Stark. Pietro's footsteps are quiet as he sneaks to each, and sends spiralling blue into their minds, making them fear and quake. Wanda does not mind knocking them down to easier targets for her brother, and he does not mind sending bolts of blue when one targets her scarlet trail.

Then the archer somehow stops her path, and there is pain and that is all.

* * *

 **xi.**  
She is leaning half on Pietro as he carries her out, and the fresh air is a balm.

"Bastard," he whispers, and strokes his fingers across her brow. "I will get him, Wanda, I will get him I _swear_ -"

Wanda shakes her head. "Hulk," she murmurs. "Get Hulk. Give me a moment, and I will take you."

* * *

 **xii.**  
They do not get to watch all of Hulk's destruction before Ultron's drones have scooped them up and reformed into a narrow plane around them. Wanda is curled against her brother, her head still pounding, and Pietro sends soft winds from his mind to hers to try to soothe it. Wanda presses kisses to his hands and speaks.

"Where are we going now?"

"To Seoul," replies Ultron, out of the one whole voice synthesizer in the mess of parts around them. "To visit a friend."

* * *

 **xiii.**  
There is a body in the Cradle, and Wanda watches Pietro send darting blue over and around it. _Read him?_ Wanda asks and Pietro sends back, _Trying_ , and then _Ahah!_

Then there is quiet and a softly said, _Oh_ **God**.

Wanda is by his side in an instant, hand in his, looking to his face. _What?_

 _He is…_ Pietro sends an image, and speaks to Ultron, and only Wanda's speed lets her process both at once.

 _He's insane._

Pietro's blue is swirling in queasy waves, and Wanda pulls him close. _We must stop him_ , she sends. _Stop this body being made, stop the Doctor, stop Ultron. I can-_

 _It is done_ , sends Pietro, and Wanda watches from the corner of her eye as Pietro's blue cracks the crystal colour in the Doctor's eyes.

Then all hell breaks loose and they flee to the city.

* * *

 **xiv.**  
Pietro's hands are running through his hair, and Wanda has to hold his wrists to stop him tearing it out. _How could we, oh Wanda, he's going to- the end of the_ **world** -

 _We must stop him_ , Wanda sends, with soft certainty. _We chose this together, and now we chose again. We stop him._

Pietro calms, and Wanda lets her swirling scarlet slow from panic to peace.

"First," Wanda says, and Pietro finishes for her.

"First, we find the Avengers."

* * *

 **xv.**  
 _They are mad_ , Pietro sends, and Wanda nods.

 _As mad as Ultron_.

Pietro almost snorts a laugh. _Well they made him._

Wanda takes a breath, rocks back on her heel. _I'm going to stop them_ , she sends and scarlet rings the Cradle and rips every tube and cable clear. When she is done, Pietro is trapped by Banner for… only a moment, as he summons his blue and pulls it through himself to push the doctor away. Wanda watches the man closely, but he does not turn green.

 _Please_ , they think, and think together. _Please do not do this, you will end the_ _ **world**_ _._

* * *

 **xvi.**  
They do not know what to make of the maroon-magenta creature, and nor, it seems, do the Avengers. Pietro sends the play of their minds to Wanda, shows her _baffled_ and _confused_ and _what the ever-loving hell?_

Then the creature lifts a hammer, and everything in the room seems changed.

* * *

 **xvii.**  
When they arrive in Novi Grad Wanda takes her brother to the church, to the centre of the city, and pours her scarlet into him as he sends blue out to warn the people. Wanda travels with his mind as he does it, gentles a touch that is sometimes too cold and adds her voice to his litany of _leave leave leave, you must get out and get to safety_.

Then the ground quakes beneath them, and they know that, in this, they have failed.

* * *

 **xviii.**  
Battle rages, and even with Rogers' pep talk, Wanda can feel the queasy swirl of her brother's mind. _Be strong_ , she sends. _We have to be. All the people, all of Novi Grad, they rely on us._ Wanda watches as Pietro buries his worry deep, deep within the ocean beneath his tree, and summons up pure blue instead.

* * *

 **xix.**  
 _Barton_ , Wanda sends, and an image of the archer and a child and, _Look,_ as Ultron brings the jet around. There is a nanosecond of a break and Pietro knows she has considered what to do. _I'm going to carry them._

There is speeding scarlet around her, a bolder red than the delicate thread that usually follows, and it is easy for Pietro to keep his blue guarding the key in the old church. He can feel her strain, carrying man and child, and gasping for air and _**PAIN**_.

Blue spirals out from him, obliterating bots, crashing them against the walls and in his mind _Wandawandawandawanda sister, my sister, Wanda-_

 _I'm ok._ Her voice is weak, but she follows it with an image of the lifeboat, and medics around her. _Ankle, knee, thigh and hip. I'll live_.

Pietro's deep breaths pull his blue into him. Cold anger replaces desperate, and with sweeping movements he tears what remains of the bots apart to build barricades. _Sister?_ he sends, and is rewarded by a blink of red from Wanda's mind. _When you can run again, tear his heart out._

Scarlet fills his mind in a slash of a smile.

* * *

 **xx.**  
Wanda's leg aches after a few minutes, but it is strong enough to run on. She uses an angled lope, to take pressure off the leg where she can, and asks her brother, _Where?_

Pietro sends a memory, crisp with frost and clear as crystal ice, of where the robot was thrown to, and Wanda makes her beeline.

* * *

 **xxi.**  
Ultron's human face has it's uses, and Wanda almost smiles at the look of surprise he gives to see her well. "Wanda?" he asks.

She inclines her head, just slightly, lets blood-brown hair fall over her shoulder.

"You should leave," he says. "You'll die if you stay."

Wanda _does_ smile then. "I almost did. Do you know what that would have done to my brother?"

Ultron's face is tense and shocked as her hand probes through the ribs and ropes of metal in his torso, through vibranium and steel and chrome to find his core. Her hand wraps around it, pulls every cable taut, and yanks it free with all her strength.

"It would have done that."

* * *

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Secret additional ending:

 **xxii.  
** Wanda's hand is still sticky with grease and oil when she finds her brother at the church, and he only just notices her fading limp.

"You're alright?" he asks, his hand tucking her hair back behind her ear.

Wanda nods and smiles, and presses a kiss to the heel of her brother's hand.

"Let's get clear," she says. "For Ultron will not."

.

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	15. Fic 14 - Prompt: Justice Served

**Prompt: Justice Served.**

 **Summary:** A sequel to _Prompt: Beg our forgiveness._

 **Notes:** Again, not part of the same HP AU as _To Share A Soul._ The Wixenomist, Grimmshel and Ammendorf are both the invention of _The Post Modern Potter Compendium_ on tumblr.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Disillusionment.

* * *

 **i.**  
For all Dumbledore's assurances that things would now be well, things were not. The trials at Nurmengard went forward but many evaded notice, or were pardoned and squirrelled away into jobs in a Department of Mysteries _here_ or _there._

"How _dare_ they?" Wanda spat, when she saw the papers. "How _dare_ they get away with what they did?"

Pietro's hand rubs her shoulders gently as he tries to soothe her anger. Wanda still shakes her head.

"How _dare_ they?"

* * *

 **ii.**  
They have never trained with wands, so when they are first given them they feel awkward in their hands. Wanda's is blackthorn, and not always reliable when her magic sparks in her eyes and from her fingers in shards of scarlet. Pietro's is oak brought all the way from England, and a loyal and helpful thing when it does manage to work.

Their attempts at spells are small and awkward, and more often than not Wanda uses her wand to hold her bun in place and works her scarlet sparks out of her fingers.

* * *

 **iii.**  
It startles people, how Wanda can flick her fingers and create a glowing crimson globe, and how Pietro barely needs to focus to pull them through Apparition and away.

"Do you have an Apparition license?" asks one of the historians, searching them out to examine the past, and Pietro shakes his head.

"And I can't cast shield spells, and _Lumos_ tends to sputter for both of us and a myriad other things. They never let us practice magic, so we learned it our own way." Pietro snorts. "I wonder how many Magical Theorists guessed that not only wands haven't always been, but that we don't really _need_ them."

"Hm," says the historian, and the next person to chase them down is a magibiologist.

* * *

 **iv.**  
"Fuck this," Wanda says when they next see Dumbledore's face in the papers. He has just been made Supreme Mugwump, given power over the International Confederation of Wizards and Wanda knows he will do nothing _at all_ with that power. "Fuck this. Fuck _him_ with the Troll's club in the pub. How _dare_ he?"

Pietro's hand rubs her shoulder, he presses gentle kisses to the back of her neck. "We can't stop it," he says. "We are only two."

Wanda's scarlet is sparking around her fingers, her eyes are glowing crimson, but it fades at her brother's touch. "Then," she says, "We must find others who agree with us."

* * *

 **v.**  
Wanda's writing, once she relearned it, is an elegant cursive, with a sharp severity strong enough to confuse those who try to guess which of them who wrote it. She starts anonymously writing articles for the papers and journals, and even sends one to the Wixenomist. Not all are accepted but enough are, and she starts receiving letters from editors, asking for anonymous articles on certain topics.

There is a slant to her writing, a sharp and constant criticism of Dumbledore and his supporters. It questions and needles and asks _why_ , why he is a hero, when he waited so long to intervene.

* * *

 **vi.**  
"What are you doing?" Pietro asks one day as she writes. The light in their room is soft, to ease the headache she has after wending her way through the twisting truths of the old records. Wanda blows softly on the ink to dry it.

"Making them question him," she says. "Making them wonder. With luck it will make his foundations crumble and then he will be gone."

Pietro's hand is gentle on the nape of her neck, rubbing away the knots that have formed. "And what," he asks, "If this does not work?"

Wanda sets her quill down, and dries the ink off with a tissue. For a moment there is nothing but the soft sound of the candles in the drafty wind and the slight sound of sand sprinkled over inked parchment. Wanda's hand reaches up to gently touch her brother's wrist.

"This will work," she says, and turns to look up to him. "But first we must go to find an old enemy."

* * *

 **vii.**  
The Potioneer they search out was one of those who had worked at Grimmshel, secreted away into British Department of Mysteries with no hullabaloo and a new name. Agent Harpier, Kleos Ammendorf now Cleos Accipiter, works deep within the Department of Mysteries making potions of cruelty and kindness and all things between.

The twins track him to his house, and wait. It is easy to break through his wards, using magic as they do and it makes Wanda smile. _You did not know_ , she thinks, _That in trying to make counters to weapons and weapons with no counters, you made the weapons of your own demise._

* * *

 **viii.**  
Accipiter is stunned when he enters the room and spots them there, and not by magic.

"Hello," Wanda says, and it is barely a whisper. "Do you remember us?"

The gibbering noise he makes is indication enough, and Wanda knows that behind her Pietro is smiling. She pushes the man into his chair, looks into his dull brown eyes with her ones filled with crimson.

"Tell," she says, "The truth of what happened to us. To all of us in Grimmshel. To all under Grindlewald, when Albus Dumbledore could have ended it. Write it out," and she pushes a self-inking quill into his hand, "Sign it, and kill yourself."

The red in her eyes rises, looks almost like blood against her rich brown. She has heard of the Unforgivables but whatever this magic she is using is, it is not that. The scarlet leeches from her eyes into Accipiter's, and he starts to write.

* * *

 **ix.**  
The next day the world is in uproar. _Is it true?_ is whispered from one mouth, _Is this real?_ from another. The _Daily Prophet_ has three versions of the article, one anonymous, one considered, and one frantic and screaming from a fledgling writer named Skeeter. Other papers and journals, on the islands, on the continent, across the ocean, pick up the news soon after.

By morning the country knows, by noon the whole of Europe does. By evening wixen America is condemning Dumbledore's actions, holding back so long, and the ICW is muttering, displeased noises rising up through the ranks.

Wanda has other articles penned and waiting, ready to stoke the fire she had built up, banked and set alight, but she does not need to. She watches the missives and new articles come flying down the Alley to the _Prophet'_ s offices, Pietro's arm around her shoulders, and knows that Dumbledore is done.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	16. Fic 15 - Prompt: All that thou hast done

**Prompt: All that thou hast done.**

 **Summary:** Pietro feels it when they try to wipe his sister's mind, all the blinding light and pain as her scarlet flees from her great cathedral towards his tree. They watch from his end of the bridge as the façade is removed, the synagogue beneath crumbled and the dust blown out into a desert.

 **Notes:** Yet another mindwiped/brainwashed AU.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Mindwiping.

* * *

 **i.**  
Pietro feels it when they try to wipe his sister's mind, all the blinding light and pain as her scarlet flees from her great cathedral towards his tree. They watch from his end of the bridge as the façade is removed, the synagogue beneath crumbled and the dust blown out into a desert.

 _Why?_ Pietro asks and Wanda shrugs.

 _They have been trying to twist us loyal from the start. Maybe they think remaking me anew will let them make me loyal, and make you follow._

Pietro considers his sisters thoughts. _Will you return?_ he asks, and gestures towards the bleak expanse of what remains.

Wanda hums and shakes her head. _I will watch_ , she says instead. _From here, maybe closer to my mind. I will retake it if I must, and weave myself in, but I will watch, your mind and mine, and keep us from going astray._

In the bridge between their minds Pietro rests his chin atop Wanda's head, and breathes her in. _Stay safe_ , he murmurs. _No matter what, stay safe._

He knows Wanda is smiling with the way her scarlet is rising around them. _I will_ , she says. _And I will keep your mind safe too_.

* * *

 **ii.**  
Watching Wanda - Wanda's body he supposes - return is terrifying to him. She is not there, and even with her presence in his mind is not comfort enough. Wanda breathes a slender string of understanding into the blank slate of her mind, and Pietro almost sobs when she hugs him.

 _What have they done?_ he asks, for all he knows the answer. _What have they_ _ **done?**_

* * *

 **iii.**  
Wanda watches the way they try to shape her mind anew, and builds branches which bend around her own firm principles. She will _present_ loyalty, she decides, but she will not _be_ loyal.

When she is not watching her own mind she is watching her brothers, watching his winds dance, his tree grow, his hummingbirds and monkeys move freely through the vast expanse of his mind. One day when she is sitting there Pietro pulls down a branch, and shows her the leaves filled with memories there.

 _You may watch_ , he says. _You were there for most of them, after all_.

Wanda smiles, and her thoughtform presses the lightest of kisses to his cheek.

* * *

 **iv.**  
Wanda spends a lot of time watching his memories after then. It takes little time and less effort to tweak the reforming mind within her brain towards her own shape, and so when she is free she pulls down branches and watches a memory caught in a great leaf. They are, much of the time, like her own, barring the emotions which accompany them, which are wholly her brothers. Silver-sharp and vicious joy, great grey-green gladness, anxiety blue-grey like twisting waves. Some are vague things, vague like dreams, or are dreams, and have touches of the red her brother has always associated with her in them.

She does not mean to find _that_ memory.

* * *

 **v.**  
Trapped beneath rubble, watching a bomb. Two children, one curled around the other, and in Pietro's mind she can feel the pressure on his ribs as he holds the weight off her with nothing but his own self. The emotions filling him are a roiling mess, anxiety and concern, pain and behind it all the great grey backbone to all of his mind.

 _Protect_.

Wanda is still too stunned by the memory to stop watching what follows, and cannot help but feel what her brother did as they were hauled free. _Warm light, grey-green gladness, and safe safe_ **safe** ,as he wrapped his arms around her again. He is not, she notices, paying attention to the medics or the police around them, and does not even note the childcare people who came after them all, beyond acknowledging their presence. There is a dull ache, she thinks, from his back and ribs, but Pietro did not dwell on it, so it is not strong. All there is is whirling grey _choice_ , and Wanda watches as everything crystalises to blue when he looks to Wanda and decides _protect_.

* * *

 **vi.**  
Pietro has always protected her, that she has known, since they were ten, since their parents died, he had taken it upon himself to guard her before all others.

But know she knew the truth of it she could not stay back and watch her brother grow his mind along those veins again. She could see it now, the protective blue in his mind touching all things, subsuming other colours and burying them beneath the odd grey loam his tree grew from.

 _Why_ , she wonders, _why, oh, why, brother would you chose to do that to yourself?_

* * *

 **vii.**  
The weight of her own body shocks her, when she steps back into her mind, and remakes her rooms and chambers, arches and vaults. She steps back from the gun, lets it rest down and walks back towards the team trailing her. The techs do not know what to make of her change from placid compliance to watchful and wary, and Wanda sighs and raises a hand and lets scarlet weave around them and hold them still.

"I would like," she says, soft and sharp, "To see my brother."

* * *

 **viii.**  
They are not pleased but cannot stop her, and it is easy to send her mind arcing out to find his. _Pietro?_ she calls and follows his blue towards him. _We must go_.

Pietro does not question, does not question at all, trusts her implicitly, that she has plan or knowledge or something yet else. They are at the church in town in the blink of an eye and it is not until he has set her down that he asks, "What now?"

Wanda sighs, and gently touches scarlet hands to his.

"Now," she says, "We fix all that has been done to you."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	17. Fic 16 - Prompt: Bolvangar Burning

**Prompt: Bolvangar Burning.**

 **Summary:** Wanda may be a witch, and thus to stay with her mother, and Pietro distinctly not and sent to their father, but they are twins, twins to the core of themselves, and when they were told to be apart their daemons had become snakes and coiled so closely around each other they could not be separated, even by the clever claws of their mother's cormorant or the clever fingers of their father's marten.

 **Notes:** Daemons/HDM AU.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.**  
Wanda may be a witch, and thus to stay with her mother, and Pietro distinctly not and sent to their father, but they are twins, twins to the core of themselves, and when they were told to be apart their daemons had become snakes and coiled so closely around each other they could not be separated, even by the clever claws of their mother's cormorant or the clever fingers of their father's marten.

Magda sighed and looked to Magnus. "You will take care of them both?" she asked and he nodded. She pressed a kiss, cold like snow, and as gentle as, to Magnus' cheek and to theirs. "I will come for them next winter, to see them again," she had promised, and she had flown away.

Wanda's hands and Pietro's had stayed clasped, and when their daemons had untangled themselves and returned to them, even they had been uncertain for a moment as to who's was who's.

* * *

 **ii.**  
Their parents, father and mother both, had found their closeness odd. Estrie did not mind leaving Pietro's side for Wanda's and Pheletes did not mind leaving Wanda's side for Pietro's. The twins were never far apart enough for it to hurt their daemons, but it unsettled them all the same, to see Estrie coiling as a snake around Wanda's neck, or Pheletes as a bird settled on Pietro's shoulder.

 _Love_ the stories said. _When one touches a daemon not one's own all involved should be repulsed, unless it is a gesture of love_.

The twins were never repulsed.

* * *

 **iii.**  
Magda rarely took them north. Wanda was a witch, she acknowledged, and should join her clan, but she could not go north with Pietro too, so she had to remain south. Magda had taught her all the same, taught her what magics she could, and gifted her a branch of cloud-pine when she turned eight.

Wanda had spent days trying to find ways to carry Pietro too, once she had learned to use the branch to fly.

* * *

 **iv.**  
They had been ten when Magda had arrived, and invited them all North. A celebration, she had said, humans loved by witches might come, and the sons of witches, and daughters who had chosen to live far from their clans. Magnus could not, busy as he was with work, but the twins could, and Pietro had been carried between mother and sister flying by cloud-pine branch.

* * *

 **v.  
** The first sign their mother had been shot was Kanerva's screech. She wheeled and curved and Magda was falling, and for all the size of Kanerva's claws she could not hold their mother up. The last they saw of her was falling dark clothes, falling dark branch, and the bleak black of a cormorant's wings against their mother's silhouette, fading into Dust.

* * *

 **vi.**  
Wanda carries them down, holding as tightly as she could to Pietro's arm. Estrie is an ermine around his neck, and Pheletes became an eagle, as big as he and Wanda could imagine, and his claws hold tight around Pietro's other wrist. The snow is a vast expanse around them, and cold, bitterly cold to Pietro's human skin. Wanda passes her cloak to him, Pheletes became a leopard and curls around him, and Wanda looks towards where their mother had fallen.

* * *

 **vii.  
** "What do we do now?" Pietro's voice is small, smaller than Wanda had ever heard it, and she looks up from breathing warm air over his hands.

Wanda's voice is smaller still as she admits, "I don't know."

* * *

 **viii.**  
Wanda does not know what to make of the men that found them, but she does not like it one bit. To find them so soon after their mother shot down… she could not like that nearness, nor what it could mean.

"Come with us," they offer. "To Bolvangar. You will be safe there, and warm, and we have food aplenty."

Estrie scurries from Pietro's arm to Wanda's, tiny claws of a tiny mouse, to whisper, "We will stay with you." Wanda shakes her head.

"Go with them," she says to Pietro. "I will find mother's clan, and let them know."

"But-" Pietro says, and Wanda knows it is but a token refusal by the way Estrie is already scurrying back to him.

"Go," Wanda repeats, gentle as she can be, and Pheletes nuzzles a farewell to Estrie and rubs one last time against Pietro's side. "I will join you at Bolvangar when mother's clan knows."

Pietro nods, and hugs her tightly before he goes. "I will wait," he says. "Until you come back."

"And I," Estrie whispers, still a mouse by Pietro's ear, "Shall keep him from trouble."

* * *

 **ix.**  
Wanda travels as best she can, as fast as she can, towards the clan she knows to fly at Lake Enara. _Mother's clan_ , she thinks. _My clan. Serafina Pekkala will help us_.

She she flies as fast as she can, through wind and snow, until she comes to waste and Pheletes' screech calls her up short.

"I cannot!" he cries and Wanda turns her branch to face him. "I cannot go this way." Wanda does not think she has ever seen a hawk's face so sad.

"It's the barren land," Wanda realises. "As mother told us."

The snowfield was empty, but for yellow grass poking up, and grey stones here and there. It looks like the rest of the land they have flown over, and Wanda is almost certain the witches of Lake Enara are near.

"I think," she whispers, "This is the fastest way."

"Do not," Pheletes begs, "Do not do this, do not part us. We are already far from our twins, do not-"

But Wanda is already flying, as fast as she can, as far as she can, and doing all she can to ignore the tearing ache as Pheletes becomes farther and farther away.

* * *

 **x.**  
She lands at the camp of the witches of Lake Enara and feels as though her bones are burning. Pheletes has not come to her, though she knows he can find her now. She tries to land gracefully, as mother always had, but stumbles, and lands, knees and hands in the snow, at the edge of the camp. One of the women, carrying a basket of plants, spots her.

"A child," she murmurs, and looks to the bird on her shoulder. "Simo," she asks, "Get Pekkala. There is a child here, with no daemon and no mother."

* * *

 **xi.**  
Wanda is carried to the tent in the centre of it all by the woman, and wrapped in a fur. "You are not human," the woman says as she goes, "But you can still feel the cold. What were you thinking travelling without at least a cloak?"

"I had one," Wanda murmurs. "I gave it to my brother."

* * *

 **xii.**  
Serafina Pekkala is a pretty woman, Wanda thinks, and there is a kind of severe kindness to her face. Her hands gently capture Wanda's, rub warmth into them as she had tried to do for Pietro.

"What happened child?" she asks, and it is in the language mother spoke to her and Pietro and only her and Pietro. "Where is your mother?"

Wanda points back whence she came. "She was shot," she says. "Kanerva couldn't stop her from falling. We saw her turn to Dust."

Pekkala's voice is still gentle. "Who? Your daemon?"

"And my brother, and his daemon." Wanda is no longer trembling, is no longer tired, and for all her bones still ache she is hungry more than hurting.

"Where is he now? With your father?" Wanda shakes her head. "And your daemon?"

"There was an expanse," Wanda says. "Pheletes couldn't cross it."

Pekkala mutters something, quiet so Wanda does not hear, to the snow goose at her side, and the daemon waddles out. Wanda can hear the flap of its wings outside the tent.

"Tell me," Pekkala asks, voice soft as ever. "Where is your brother now?"

* * *

 **xiii.**  
Wanda cannot believe the witches already mean to go to Bolvangar, until they tell her why. _Tearing people apart from themselves_ , Wanda thinks, _tearing_ _ **children**_ _from themselves._ Wanda asks for her cloud-pine back, and to join them.

"You are welcome to," Pekkala says. "But when we get there you must be careful."

* * *

 **xiv.**  
To fly with the clan is a kind of beauty Wanda can only compare to flying with mother and Pietro. They fly fast, the witches singing something that makes the winds speed them on their way, farther and farther from the settlement at the lake, and closer and closer to Bolvangar.

"What are we going to do?" she asks the witch-queen and Pekkala merely nods towards the building in the snow.

"For now? For now we wait."

* * *

 **xv.**  
Wanda is not sure how long she has waited - she later learns it was only an hour - before she flies closer to the queen and tugs her sleeve. "My brother," she says. "He said he would stay until I came for him. May I go to tell him?"

The green eyes of the witch-queen have some odd quality, Wanda thinks, to reflect the light quite as they do, but eventually she bows her head in a nod. "Keep the fur," she says, "And hide your branch with us. Do not tell them your Pheletes is away, tell them he is hiding in your clothes."

Wanda nods, and promises.

* * *

 **xvi.**  
They do not take her to Pietro when they let her in and Wanda thinks that is the first warning. "My brother," she insists. "He came here days ago, his name is Pietro." The woman shakes her head, the guard shakes his, and Wanda tries to find the trick their mother had tried to teach her, to become innocuous.

It takes her an hour before she slips away.

* * *

 **xvii.**  
The corridors are coiling, twisting things, but eventually Wanda finds a room where there are other children. She tugs one close, forces the spell of her hiding to stretch over them too and asks, "Where is my brother?" The child shrugs and points vaguely out of the door, and Wanda tries not to grind her teeth.

* * *

 **xviii.**  
Some of the doors are locked and Wanda does not know the trick mother had used to open their bedroom windows to take her and Pietro flying. Door and door and door and door, and all alike, and Wanda _hates_ this.

She almost slaps Pheletes when he buzzes up to her ear in the form of a fly.

* * *

 **xix.**  
"How did you get here?" she asks, and Pheletes becomes a snake around her neck to speak clearly.

"Kaisa found me. The snow goose. He said you needed to find our twins." It is plain, Wanda thinks, from what he says, that no matter his grudge against her for hurting him, Pietro and Estrie come even before that.

Wanda sighs with relief, and runs her hand over the soft scales of her daemon's head. "Do you know where they are?"

"This way," Pheletes says, and becomes a fly again, darting down the hall.

* * *

 **xx.**  
Wanda does not quite recall what happened when they find their twins. There was a guillotine, she knows, and Pietro screaming and Estrie crying out and Wanda saw nothing but red as Pheletes became a dragon to tear the cage apart.

Wanda thinks there is a magic of anger, and that is why their mother had taught her self-control at five rather than at Pietro's six. The room, she knows, is ruined, but does not care with Pietro in her arms, Estrie by her ear, Pheletes perched on her brother's shoulder.

"We have to get out," she whispers. "Pekkala is here for all of the children, all of mother's clan. Bolvangar is to be destroyed."

Pietro nods, just as the siren goes off.

* * *

 **xxi.**  
They emerge to chaos, and children already following a girl out. Wanda waves to the witches, catches her cloud-pine, and pulls her brother into the skies.

"Stay high up," Pekkala whispers, flying past. "Let us fight this fight."

Estrie's claws dig into Pietro's collar to hold him up, Pheletes holds his wrist and Wanda holds his hand, and together the four watch as Bolvangar and its soldiers made ruin.

* * *

 **xxii.  
** Years upon years later she and Pietro still meet. Wanda is not sure why he does not age as other humans do, but she is grateful for it, even if it is born of Bolvangar trying to tear him and Estrie apart. Estrie still tries to race Pheletes, and though she is faster, he can go farther. Wanda and Pietro watch them from her cloud-pine branch, peregrine falcon racing red-tailed hawk, and feel almost children again.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	18. Fic 17 - Prompt: The tower their temple

**Prompt: The tower their temple.**

 **Summary:** Wanda is not sure how many times she has had to tell her brother, "I am a god too. I can protect myself." To him she will always be his little sister, always one who he must protect, but Wanda now wields the sun and it is not as though the following moon can do very much to that.

But Pietro still tries, and Wanda would never stop him.

 **Notes:** Greek Myth AU. Cast Roles (sorta): Wanda - Apollo, Pietro - Artemis, Vision - Hephaestus, Clint - Hermes, Nat - Persephone, Stark - Zeus, Bruce - Asclepius, Helen - Aceso, Steve - Athena, Rhodey - Aeolus, Sam - One of the Anemoi (Notos or Zephyros), Thor - Thor, Ultron - the Telkhines.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.**  
Wanda is not sure how many times she has had to tell her brother, "I am a god too. I can protect myself." To him she will always be his little sister, always one who he must protect, but Wanda now wields the _sun_ and it is not as though the following moon can do very much to that.

But Pietro still tries, and Wanda would never stop him.

* * *

 **ii.**  
Their parents are dead, have been dead since before their Ascension, but it doesn't make the ache any easier. There is a reason they stay close, a reason Wanda's glowing light always reaches towards Pietro, a reason he never strays far from her side.

* * *

 **iii.**  
They do not like Stark, throwing his lightning everywhere, commanding the skies, demanding rights and respect. Clint is easier to be around, carrying messages here and there, and Natasha, when above the depths of the Underworld she rules, is a kind of comfort. But Stark they cannot stand, and much prefer to send their powers dancing into the sky as sun and moon than venture there themselves.

* * *

 **iv.**  
No one knows of the Vision at first. Bruce had been quiet about who - or what - he precisely had been Healing, and the arrival of the Norse, summoning lightning more striking even than Stark's bolts of thunder-and-lightning had been startling but not revealing.

They do not know about Vision the Maker until he reveals himself to them, skin the pink-purple of sunrise and sunset, and a stone as richly glowing as Wanda's light in his brow.

Pietro does not like him, mostly on principle, but Wanda finds him interesting enough to be around.

* * *

 **v.**  
They do not know that Stark had taken Vision from Ultron half made and made him complete with Bruce and the Norse one. Ultron had made his thunderbolts, had made Natasha's helmet, had made Sam's wings, but, Stark claimed, he had been dabbling in science not meant for even gods, let alone men, let alone the creating Telkhines. The Vision was confiscated, and Ultron, Ultron was not pleased.

* * *

 **vi.**  
"He always does this," Pietro mutters hurling himself with all the force of the meteors which strike his moon into the battle. "Stark starts wars and expects us to help him because we like him Ascended. He should fight his own battles."

Light is dancing around Wanda's hands and she sends it, as hot as the sun itself, toward Ultron, trying to burn through his armour. "Yes," she says, speaking through light and on the level that only Pietro understands and hears. "But we have always known him a fool in all things since he killed our parents."

* * *

 **vii.  
** Vision fights alongside them. Wanda wonders if he knows quite as much as Rogers' had figured out and said, if he knows that he is fighting the ones who first made him. He wields his own weapons, something around the stone on his brow allowing him to cast light as bright as Wanda's and more powerful than Stark's thunderbolts. His armour is like a second skin, impenetrable to the attacks of Ultron and his Telkhines.

They still do not know quite what to make of him, a creature born already Ascended, but he fights alongside them all, alongside Natasha casting them down to her realm, alongside Clint tricking them this way and that, alongside the Norse one(they know now he is called Thor, and had only recently Ascended for all his powers). Sam and Rhodey fly faster than Stark's thunderbolts and weave between his poor-placed strikes, and Bruce, waits, not certain yet if he should send out the plague that only he and Helen could cure.

* * *

 **viii.**  
Eventually - eventually - Ultron is defeated. Wanda's light burned a hole through his whole chest, and Pietro with the others rounded up the fleeing Telkhines to make sure no knowledge was spread of the works that had been making (weapons made to be bathed in blood, more creatures like Vision, made to be born Ascended, creatures with too many heads and too few mouths, made of bones or with none to speak of).

There is a party at the tower, and Pietro merely nods and watches as Wanda and Vision take themselves away from everyone else.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	19. Fic 18 - Prompt: Three Ways Through

**Prompt: Three Ways Through.**

 **Summary:** Wanda meets Jessica by accident, Luke on a tip, and Matt on purpose. Grief and gifts, and how they can intertwine.

 **Notes:** Rakija is the name for grappa/raki in Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian, and I _think_ the likely term Wanda would use to refer to it. That said there are a _bunch_ of terms for it and also I am terrible at Geography. I also acknowledge there is a _bit_ of stretched probability here, but if I had not stretched this, it would have been much much longer.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **1\. Jessica Jones**

* * *

 **1\. i.**  
Wanda meets Jessica first and it's entirely by accident.

She had been walking in New York, finally trusted enough to go without a constant companion or tail. She was largely ignored, her scarlet snaking into the minds of those around her asking _please leave me be._ One man gave her a decent berth, and instead shouldered past another woman. Wanda watched the woman's mind flare, an image of a punch, an image of a woman in front of a lorry, an image of a car crash and the woman was leaning against the wall breathing hard.

"Are you alright?" Wanda spreads her scarlet further, turns _please leave me be_ into _leave us be_ , and gently reaches toward the woman.

A hand comes up, almost covered by the sleeve of the woman's leather jacket. "Don't touch me."

Wanda's hands slip into her own pockets. "Flashback?" she asks, instead.

The woman looks up to her, and Wanda thinks her pretty but for what seems likely to be a constant frown. "What would you know about that?"

Scarlet-jacketed shoulders shrug. "I have my own. I guessed. I saw your mind."

The look the woman gives her is something between " _of course_ " and " _god help me_ ", but morphs into a frown again. "Stay out of my head."

"I was," Wanda says. "I see minds regardless of if I'm in them or not." She pauses, thinks of what Pietro had said when she had first told him that, before he had done his best to wrap her mind with his. "It sucks."

The woman laughs, just slightly, and Wanda smiles. "Superpowers do, don't they?"

Wanda's smile widens. "I'm Wanda," she says, and offers her hand.

The woman eyes her, tilts her head back to get her hair out of her eyes and takes her hand. "Jessica," she says. "Jessica Jones."

* * *

 **1\. ii.**  
Jessica, Wanda learns, is a P.I., and a decent one at that. She has super strength, and an ex-boyfriend with impenetrable skin, and another who she'd killed a month back after he'd tried to mind control her again.

"It's why," Jessica says, waving fingers towards her skull, "I don't like people in my head. 's fucking creepy." In her mind Wanda can see memories, tinged with a deep purple and a sickening thread of _nononononononono_ as Jessica's body does things Jessica's mind did not tell it to do.

"I have a teammate like that," Wanda admits. "He tased me when I tried to touch his mind."

Jessica almost barks a laugh, and slams her hand on the bar. "Good on him," she says. "He have it happen before, then?"

Wanda nods. "Loki," she says. "The Battle of New York, just before it."

"Jesus," Jessica says. "That must be some trauma."

Wanda frowns, bites her lip. "The memories are like a bruise in his mind but other than that, he… He _seems_ quite well adjusted."

"And your mind-mojo is infallible?" Jessica asks. Once again Wanda shrugs.

* * *

 **1\. iii.**  
They are three drinks in before Wanda asks, "The memories. The ones I saw after that man walked into you, seeing people killed in front of you, losing family. How do-"

"How do I deal with it?" Jessica interrupts, and signals the barkeeper for a refill. She raises her shotglass, amber whiskey glowing in the soft lights. "I drink."

Wanda turns her shotglass of vodka between her fingers. "I've tried that. Natasha stole my vodka after the second day, and my rakija."

Jessica chuckles. "Trish tried that once. Now I go to bars when she does."

Wanda is quiet, turning the glass between her fingers, and watching the liquid swirl against the sides.

* * *

 **1\. iv.**  
"What happened?" Jessica asks, when they are seven shots in. "What's got you torn up inside?"

Wanda is spinning her present glass of vodka, not between her fingers but absent-mindedly with her scarlet. "My brother," she says, and it is barely a whisper. "He died. I felt him die."

There is a look on Jessica's face as though she wants to swear, but instead she removes Wanda's glass from her scarlet and presses it to her hand. "Superpowers," she says, and her smile is wry. "They _suck_."

Wanda's laugh is not quite true, but she downs the shot with Jessica, and asks for another.

* * *

 **1\. v.**  
They are ten shots in when Wanda asks, "Your family. Do you still miss them?"

"Every day," Jessica replies, lifting her glass. "Until I start drinking."

"Our parents died when we were ten," Wanda says, not noticing she has slipped into plurals. "Pietro remembered them better than I did."

Jessica is quiet, and taps her fingers over the wood of the bar. "When did you lose him?" she asks, voice soft.

Wanda thinks. Wanda counts. "In May," she says. "The sixth."

"It will hurt," Jessica says, and it is a promise and an apology. "It will hurt forever."

* * *

 **2\. Luke Cage**

* * *

 **2\. i.**  
She meets Luke after Jessica. An address slipped from one woman to the other, a small bar, well managed and clean, and Wanda was not sure what to make of it. She slides onto a stool, looks around, and is almost startled when the man asks her what she'd like.

"Vodka," she says, "Or rakija if you have it."

"We have vodka," the man says, reaching beneath the bar, "And rakomelo, if that's close enough?"

Wanda shakes her head. "Too sweet. Vodka, please."

The man smiles slightly and sets down a glass. "How strong?"

Wanda smiles slightly at the images of the different bottles dancing in his mind. "Strong enough to blind someone," she says.

* * *

 **2\. ii.**  
Wanda is on her second shot and the bar is still empty when the man asks, "So what brought you here?"

"A friend," Wanda says, "Sort of. She recommended it."

The man is wiping down the bar at the far end, but his voice is still clear enough to be heard. "This friend have a name?"

"Jessica," Wanda says, and spots the rising image coming from the man's mind. "Yes, the one you're thinking of."

"How the hell you know that?"

Wanda tries not to smile, tries to be serious, but cannot. "I can read minds."

* * *

 **2\. iii.**  
There is silence for a moment before the purple man in Jessica's mind appears in this man's and he points a finger at Wanda. "You stay out of my head."

"I am," Wanda says. "I cannot help what I see just watching." She is quiet for a moment, but the man still seems unconvinced. "It gives me headaches," she offers, "To watch constantly and to go in people's minds too much. The only exception was my brother and he is… he is gone."

The man humphs slightly and starts moving back down the bar, wiping surfaces down as he goes. "New York battle?" he asks, "Or one of the other crazy ones the Avengers bring about?"

"Novi Grad," Wanda says quietly. "The Battle of Novi Grad. Your news calls it the battle of Sokovia, but it only truly covered half the city."

The face the man pulls is midway between a frown and bemusement. "Makes sense," he says. "White news anchors always like to claim they're more important than they are."

Wanda cannot help herself and smiles. "I'm Wanda," she says. "Wanda Maximoff."

"Luke," the barman says. "Luke Cage."

* * *

 **2\. iv.**  
After that they are quiet. Introductions aside and bar mostly empty there is little to speak of. Wanda drinks slowly, other people pop in, pop out, speak scattered words to Luke and vanish off again after a usually cheerful farewell from the barman.

"Why're you here?" Luke asks eventually. "Why did Jessica send you here? 'Cause you're superpowered like us, 'cause you're fucked up, 'cause-"

"Because," Wanda says, gently interrupting. "I have a gift and I have grief and they are interlinked." She spins the glass between her fingers, then downs its contents. "I was still linked to my brother's mind when he died."

"Right," Luke says, and removes the glasses in front of her. "For a start, you should stop drinking. Jessica is not a good role model for dealing with grief or trauma."

Wanda's smile is almost distracted as she watches the curling pale gold affection reach from Luke's mind around a memory of Jessica. "But you still care about her, and she about you."

"Well," Luke says. "We've been through some shit together. Kilgrave for one."

For a moment Wanda is confused and then, "The purple man? All of your and Jessica's memories of him are touched with purple, like the suit he wore."

Luke nods, "That's him. Mind controlling dick." He wipes the bar in front of Wanda down, almost absently, then turns to a tap in the corner to pour a glass of water. "However," he says, setting the glass down in front of Wanda, "We're not talking about that. We're talking about how drinking to forget your sorrows doesn't work."

Wanda's scarlet plays out from her fingers, wrapping around the glass moments before her fingers. "What does, then?"

"Therapy," Luke says, "But neither Jessica or I go in for that. Coming to terms with it on your own. Learning to fight so you can protect you and yours if it happens again."

"There's only me now," Wanda murmurs. "The team can protect themselves and they… They are not my brother. My brother was… he was half of me."

There is silence for a moment, and Luke gently prods the glass in Wanda's loose grip more firmly into her hands. "I'm sorry," he says. "Its never easy to lose those you love."

* * *

 **3\. Matt Murdock**

* * *

 **3\. i.**  
Matt Murdock she meets on purpose. Natasha recommends him, when Wanda asks after a lawyer to help her, with accounts and a will for herself and to look over her contracts with S.H.I.E.L.D.-That-Is. Wanda captures the address rising from Natasha's mind even as the spy writes it down, and captures the image which follows, of the man with red glasses.

"He's good," Natasha promises, "And honest, and he'll do what good he can."

Wanda does not know what she expects from his mind when she goes to meet him, but it is not a world on fire.

* * *

 **3\. ii.**  
It is hard to talk to Matt Murdock, when she is constantly watching the flames rising from his mind. They are not burning, just as the snow in Natasha's mind is not cold, and the winds of her brother's mind never pushed her. But they leap and crackle and change and sometimes Wanda thinks she can make out faces in the flames.

"Are you alright?" he asks, after the third time she has been distracted. His voice is soft and pleasant, and Wanda almost nods before she remembers he is blind.

"Just distracted," she says instead, and Murdock rises, reaching for his cane.

"Would you like to join me for a walk?" he asks. "I haven't been to church in a while, and it's much more peaceful than here."

Wanda pauses, rises. "I'm not religious," she says, as a warning, offering him her arm. "And even when I was, I was not Christian."

Murdock only smiles, and gently takes her arm. "You don't have to be religious to appreciate the peace of the church," he says, "And you don't have to be Christian to be welcome there."

"Church-goers have burned down Synagogues before."

She almost misses how Murdock inclines his head. "True enough," he says as they walk out of the building. "But I can promise no one will try to hurt you where we're going."

* * *

 **3\. iii.**  
The church is large and quiet, and Wanda recognises aspects of it's shape in the formation of the cathedral she crafted around the synagogue foundations of her mind. _Faith shaped me_ , she remembers, _But not the one I show to others_. Murdock walks with her to a pew, and Wanda gently makes sure he is able to manoeuvre in. In all the chaos of Sokovia Wanda had rarely seen a true example of deafening silence, but the church holds it, silent ranks upon silent ranks of pews, soft breezes and the hanging chandeliers, the only real noise the soft sound of prayer and on person speaking quietly in a box to one side.

"What was distracting you?" Murdock's voice is soft, and barely echoes over the stone and through the silence. Wanda is not entirely certain of what to say but eventually:

"Your mind," she says. "It looks like it's on fire."

Murdock seems surprised. "So," he says. "When you said you were recommended _Nelson & Murdock_ by a teammate, you meant a super-teammate."

"Natasha," Wanda confirms. "Agent Romanoff, Black Widow. Yes."

He chuckles. "So now we're on government payroll. Sort of."

"No," Wanda says. "Just mine. But S.H.I.E.l.D.-That-Is keeps an eye on you. New and honest, Natasha said. They may try to hire you."

"Last people to try to put us on retainer turned out to be working for Fisk," Murdock says, "and trying to burn down the whole of Hell's Kitchen. Not going to happen." Wanda sees the fires of his mind flare like a beacon, marking the memory a certainty and truth. "The right thing," Murdock says, "Is not always the easy one."

Wanda remembers how she had wished to die after the battle, and how the only thing to hold her back had been the idea of Pietro's disapproval. "Yes," she says, in lieu of anything else. "Yes, that's true."

* * *

 **3\. iv.**  
They are quiet for a while. The person who had been speaking in the box to one side emerges, and a few minutes later so too does a man with a priest's collar. Murdock leans slightly towards Wanda as the man walks towards them, past them.

"That's Father Lantom. He's good company for moral quandaries."

"Moral…. How many moral quandaries do you get into?"

Murdock smiles. "More than you might think." Rising from the flames of his mind are memories of pain, of punches, of bones breaking, cuts being made.

"You hurt people," Wanda breathes, and then another memory rises from his mind. "You're the Devil of Hell's Kitchen."

* * *

 **3\. v.**  
The flurry of memories that arise when Wanda says that aloud give her pause for several moments. People hurt, people being hurt, hurting people, training, feeling blood and a face that Murdock's mind identifies as _father_ and, suddenly, vision, sight in bright technicolour, of watching another man called Murdock fighting in a ring. Words float through Murdock's mind. _Be careful of the Murdock boys. They've got the devil in them._

"How do you do that?" Wanda asks. "How do you do that and still believe?"

Murdock shrugs. "I do," he says. "I just do. How do you see all you have and _not_ believe?"

"Bombs," Wanda says, "When my brother and I were ten. One killed our parents and the other stayed there, taunting us in the rubble until we were rescued. Try to believe after watching your whole city be torn apart, hearing your country dying."

"I've done the first," Murdock says. "I fight against that every night and day."

" _How?_ " Wanda asks, but she does not know what she expects of a response.

"Because I don't think God would want the world to burn when people like us can stop it," Murdock says, and his mind is ringing with the note of _tenet_. "Because God commands that we love our fellow man as we would love ourselves."

"What if the love we had for ourselves is gone?"

They are quiet. The candles at the front flicker. The wind blows softly down the nave. "Then," Murdock says, "You need to learn how to be yourself, and how to love yourself."

Wanda does not know how to express that that is impossible, and scarlet begins to reach out without her asking. "May I…?" she asks. "I need to show you something, something I cannot say."

Murdock smile slightly. "Don't put out the fire."

Wanda's fingers stretch towards him and her scarlet shows him what she cannot say.

* * *

 **3\. vi.**  
Matt is silent. "So," he says eventually, "Your brother and you were as much one person as you were individuals."

"Yes," Wanda says. "In simple terms, yes."

"And with you in his mind and he in yours losing him was like losing yourself."

Wanda's head tilts forward. "Yes."

"Then," Matt says, "I'll tell you what I do." Wanda can see the vague shape of it, swirling in his mind, _guilt_ and _right_ and _wrong_ and _what is right?_ twisting around each other. "Hold onto yourself. Whatever remains. Decide what you won't do. Decide what those you've lost would want of you. Live for their memory, as much as for yourself and if you feel yourself slipping… come have a talk." He smiles. "With _Nelson & Murdock_ as your lawyers our door will always be open to you."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	20. Fic 19 - Prompt: Speed Limits

**Prompt: Speed Limits.**

 **Summary:** Speed Limits. They exist for a reason. Sometimes Wanda wishes her brother would remember what happened when he tried to go faster than his best.

 **Notes:** An Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies AU. By a friend's calculations AOU Pietro goes at about Mach 2.81 max speed, hence Mach 3 "you finally cracked it". The rest of the numbers are my own approximates to cover the fact that just because Pietro can run fast doesn't mean he can see what the hell he's doing.

 **Warnings:** Codependency,

* * *

 **i.**  
Wanda loved the feel of her brother's mind so close to her own. She loved his presence and his comfort, she loved _him_ , he was her brother and after all they'd been through he was half of her.

But sometimes he was _really_ stupid.

* * *

 **ii.**  
"I told you," Wanda says in angrily bitten out Sokovian. "Do not exhaust yourself. Do not overwork yourself. _Do not strain yourself_."

"But-" Pietro reaches to point toward the cupboard, and in his mind she can see a can of… some vague fizzy drink, Coca Cola or Red Bull or Lucozade or _something_ sugary and caffienated or otherwise meant to help regain energy. Wanda's scarlet darts away, opens the cupboard, pulls the bottle towards them. It slaps into Pietro's hand with a rather final _thwack_.

He pulls a face as he cracks open the Lucozade and starts to drink.

* * *

 **iii.**  
It is not yet a minute later that he tries to get up again. _No_ , Wanda pushes towards him. _Stop_.

"I just want to-"

 _Rest_. Wanda holds his hand tight. "Please."

He tugs her hand gently, blue eyes almost burning into hers. "I'm fine," he murmurs. "I promise."

"Your heart is still racing," Wanda murmurs back, still in Sokovian. "I can feel it from you. Faster than the hummingbirds of your mind. You've not run that fast before, you aren't going to recover so soon."

* * *

 **iv.**  
They had not expected to be called to battle, and they _certainly_ had not expected Pietro to have had to run so fast or so long. It did not help that it was _downhill_ , and rather steeply.

The acceleration he had built up almost ploughed him into a building, and the only thing that saved him was his reflexes, as fast as he was. Wanda's mind had been calling to his, having received nothing but blurs so fast even Pietro had been having trouble interpreting them, pain pricking over her skin from maintaining the bond at the distance.

"Mach 3," Stark's voice said over comms. "You finally cracked it."

Wanda could feel Pietro's lungs burning, heart beating faster than any of the hummingbirds of his mind, his eyes shut tight as the world stopped spinning, and she felt him lifting a hand to flip off Stark. _Fuck you_ , rose from Pietro's mind, clear as crystal, even as he could not say it. _Tell him?_ Pietro's mind asked as his body hauled in heavy breaths.

 _No,_ Wanda said, touching down beside him from her scarlet-powered leap. _Rest. You can tell him later_.

* * *

 **v.**  
Wanda sat with him when they get back to base. Pietro was still exhausted, still breathing heavily, even after the Widow had hauled out a small oxygen tank from the medical cupboard on the Quinjet. She had sat beside him on the flight too, patching up her brother while he was still too exhausted to gently slap her hands away and insist he could do it himself.

 _Rest_ , she pushed towards his mind. Sokovian, English, German, Russian, Hebrew, all the languages and fragments of languages she knew, she pushed the concept towards him. _Rest, sleep, recover. I'll be here when you wake_.

 _I'm_ **fine** , Pietro insisted. _I'll_ _ **be**_ _fine at least._

"That as may be," Wanda had said softly, speaking Sokovian for privacy. "You will rest. You've never pushed yourself like that before, and I will not risk losing you again."

Pietro had sobered after that, long enough to let them carry him off the jet.

* * *

 **vi.**  
"I don't know why you worry so much," Pietro says, and it's a murmur. "You know I will be fine, that I recover faster than most." His hand reaches up to gently stroke her hair back. "I'm fine," he says. "Feel my heartbeat. Just usual hummingbird-fast."

Wanda sighs and leans into his touch. "Mach 3," she murmurs. "Mach _3_. Do you remember how hard they pushed you before to try to make you break it?" Pietro loses his teasing expression. "You were running into your cell walls for _weeks_."

At the corners, Pietro's mouth quirks. "I'm not running into walls now," he says. "What was it the English Language teacher used to say? _Hunky-dory_. I'm all _hunky-dory_."

He still winces when Wanda gently pokes his ribs. "You strained yourself," she says. "What was it the doctors at the castle used to say? _Oxygen debt_."

 _Fuck you_ , rises in a cheerfully laughing bubble from Pietro's mind and then, "I still need to get back at Stark for that. He sounded so surprised I'd managed it."

Wanda's poke is rather more meaningful, and Pietro's wince is rather worse. Scarlet twitches forwards from Wanda's fingers, and gently rubs the tense muscle around Pietro's ribs. "We _were_ surprised you'd managed it. Mach 2.81, remember? That was the most you managed before. The absolute most, and it would _exhaust_ you."

Pietro's hand gently squeezes hers. "I'm sorry," he whispers, in English. "I'm sorry I worried you," he says, and it is Sokovian again.

* * *

 **vii.**  
Pietro is sleeping - finally - when Vision drops by. The team had already seen Wanda hovering by her brother while Doctor Cho had treated him earlier, and departed one-by-one, and after the first few times the twins had been hurt they had learned that neither would leave the other's side if one of them was injured.

* * *

 **viii.**  
" _Flowers in the Attic_ ," Stark would say, and be gently walloped around the head by Romanoff or Wilson or Rhodes.

"They've lost a lot," Steve would say, as they filed out. "You should have seen the Commandos when one of us was hurt. We were worse than old ladies, worrying."

The first time, Wanda remembered, there had been a pause before Stark had gone, "I really _didn't_ need an image of the Howling Commandos all toothless and in granny stockings, Rogers."

* * *

 **ix.**  
"How is he doing?" Vision asks, voice soft as ever, sitting down on the other side of Pietro's bed. "None of the records said he could-"

"He couldn't," Wanda said, shortly. "2.81. That was it." Her hand reaches out to where her brother sleeps, and gently strokes sun-bleached curls back from his brow. In his sleep Pietro briefly frowns, before tilting his face up into her touch. "2.81 _hurt him_. He could barely see and react fast enough. He never carries me faster than 1.7 because he starts …," she slips into Sokovian when her English isn't good enough to fill the gap, "He can't process what he is seeing fast enough to react in time."

There is a moment's pause before Vision nods and says, in perfect Sokovian, "Would you rather speak like this?"

Wanda's hands still play gently through her brother's hair, occasionally sending out sparks of scarlet into his mind, chasing away nightmares, keeping his rest peaceful. "We should learn better English," she says, using the language to emphasise the point. "It would be better if you or they tell us the right words when we do not know them."

Vision smiles. "I thought your brother believed we should learn Sokovian if we mean to meddle in your country again?"

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	21. Fic 20 - Prompt: Stress Relief

**Prompt: Stress Relief.**

 **Summary:** Wanda hears Pietro down the comms, flirting as they try to get people out of Novi Grad, and resolves to talk to him about it later. There is a time and a place for flirting, and she had not expected it from Pietro.

 **Notes:** An Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies AU. This ficlet is mostly to explain the (semi-canon) deleted scenes of Pietro flirting with various women. Given we don't see it in the film itself it seems out of character given what we do see in the film, and thanks to a prompter I got given a start to write out my headcanon on this.

In honesty Pietro flirting as he does in the deleted scenes makes no sense to me, because after the film itself I read him as almost entirely asexual, uninterested in almost all people in all ways, with the singular exception of caring for his sister, and remembering their parents. Wanda leads them, Wanda decides what they do, for the most part, and he protects her before all else. He doesn't allow for space outside of that much, beyond poking fun at others. So when the flirting scenes turned up, my brain started trying to find reasons for them to exist, and with the aid of the prompt, eventually struck on this.

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.**  
Pietro was lying in the medical bay on the Helicarrier when Wanda got to him. He'd heard her mind as soon as he'd been dragged back to life by the archer's CPR efforts and his own increased metabolism speeding his healing, and as soon as her feet touch the runway when the Vision sets her down her mind goes from desperately pushing _warmth_ and _love_ and _comfort_ to him to _I'm coming, I'm coming, I will be with you soon_. She arrives scant minutes afterwards, the android trailing after her, and her scarlet darts between the surgeons trying to keep him anaesthetised while they try to work on his perforated body, and pulls out the bullets without any effort.

 _I'm here_ , her mind says, the warmth of her scarlet pressed against the blue of his mind. _Rest. I will hide the pain from you._ Then the scarlet sweeps through his mind, finds the stabbing shards of silver and white lightning, and hides them behind a curtain as dark as night.

Pietro sleeps.

* * *

 **ii.**  
When Pietro wakes he is not sure where he is. It is a different room, and the windows show a different view, but being on the Helicarrier before means this could be anything from a base to simply several thousand miles away from where Novi Grad was detonated.

"Pietro," breathes a voice beside him, and he meets Wanda's eyes.

They do not need to speak for her to see the _I'm so sorry_ , in his eyes, for him to read the _Oh, thank goodness you're alive_ in hers. Wanda's hand wraps around his, and brings his knuckles to her lips to kiss.

* * *

 **iii.**  
They are quiet awhile. They do not need to speak to enjoy one another's presence, they have had only each other and relied on only each other for so long silence is as much a comfort as sound. Wanda's hand stays wrapped around Pietro's and Pietro's fingers barely twitch in hers, only his thumb moving, stroking a steady soothing line over the back of her hand.

"Pietro," Wanda says eventually, and Pietro can just about see the swirling scarlet-and-gold of a question in her mind. "The comms," she says, "The earpieces. I heard you flirting."

There is a warning note to her tone and Pietro knows that anyone within hearing would hear the question in what his sister said - if they could understand Sokovian, that is - but does not think they would truly grasp the layers. Few people ever did. It was not _Why would you flirt with them?_ It was not _Why did you not tell me?_ It was not even _Why did you waste time like that?_ It was, simply enough, _Why?_

He can see the possibilities in her mind down their bridge, wondering at it somewhat, that he had not told her, that she had not glimpsed even the possibility in his mind before. He squeezes her hand gently. "Stress relief," he says. "Protecting you is stressful. Sometimes too stressful. I do it to know people I can let off stress with, when I know you're safe."

Wanda's free hand twitches slightly, and Pietro can see in the scarlet of her mind _You do not_ _ **need**_ _to protect me any more._

"Yes I do," he murmurs, keeping the Sokovian soft. "You're my sister. My little sister and my twin. What would I do if you were hurt?"

Wanda gives a wry smile. "The same thing I did when you were," she says, and Pietro cannot help but nod. Wanda's fingers play slightly over his knuckles. "I did not see any of it in your mind. No stress relief, nothing that is… nothing related to it. Other people when they think of it it is bold. It is bright and obvious. I never saw any of it in your mind."

Pietro's mouth twitches to a smile. "You wouldn't," he says. "There was none with HYDRA and after…." he catches strands of Wanda's hair and gently twists them between his fingers. "It's not desire. That is a distraction."

"You're always distracted," Wanda interjects. "Always teasing, always wanting to do something else."

"Around _you_ ," Pietro says. "It anchored you, after. And before it gave you a focus." He tugs her hair gently, as he had when he was little to get her attention before her magic had linked their minds. "What I _mean_ is, it's a distraction from you. From protecting you."

"I don't need protecting, Pietro. Not any more."

Pietro's face turns almost sad, almost lost, and she squeezes his hand gently in comfort. "Wanda," he says, and his mouth wraps around her name in the same soft way it ever has, claiming her as his twin, his counterpart, just as her calling his name does the same for her. His eyes are solemn. "I flirt so if I am stressed I can stop being stressed. Stress is a distraction, more than they are." His thumb strokes over the back of her hand. "That is why it was never in my mind. They were not the distraction. The stress was."

Wanda's head tilts forward, and Pietro catches her against his still-healing chest. The pain of her head against his healing bullet wounds is not a distraction, though the noise of others outside the room risks being so, and Pietro keeps his eyes fixed on the door as Wanda's scarlet dances around them.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	22. Fic 21 - Movement of Minds (Or: A Mind L

**Movement of Minds (Or: A Mind Like Ementhal)**

 **Summary:** To Wanda minds are glowing jewels from a distance, pieces of the world glittering and shining and shimmering with light. Up close they can be anything, and are always complex ways of understanding the person they are of.

A study of the minds Wanda has seen, in approximate order.

 **Notes:** The different minds Wanda has seen, in approximate order, up to and including Bucky's. Includes a description of how she perceives minds, from a distance and in more detail up close. Probably won't be entirely Canon Compliant.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Canon Deaths.

* * *

Wanda watches the minds around her and more often than not they are the first things she sees. Glowing out in the colour-bland world of her usual vision they shine, shine like jewels or like water or like stars, and she learns their colours and their shapes, and how to play with them.

The first mind she ever saw was not her own. The first she saw was Pietro's beside her, glowing blue and silver and grey, like a silver-rutilated piece of aquamarine quartz. The rutilation wove through his mind like a tree, rising from some deep well, and stretching beyond what she could see, once within his mind. _Wanda_ , he had said, when he had felt her there. _Your mind looks like blood_.

The second mind she had seen had been her own, a cathedral façade over the shape of a synagogue, black and scarlet, gold and deep brown, and spots of silver wherever Pietro had touched. _You are welcome here_ , she had sent to Pietro. _You are always welcome here_.

The third mind she had seen was Strucker's. It was an oily machine, well-greased, well oiled, but with a build-up of gunk around each join, around where cogs were meant to turn. It looked like a gun emplacement, and one that was on its way to rusting into place, touches of vomit-orange seeping their way over grey-green and dusty shadows. Wanda liked him even less after she had seen that.

The fourth mind she had seen had been Doctor List's. Pristine pale greens and blues, and white sheets over neat steel lines like a checked pattern made of scalpels. There was a precision to the healthcare he offered them, to his suggestions for training, and all of them were edged with a blade which had a tendency to worry the wounds of his mind. Wanda had no taste for his indecision.

The fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth minds she had seen had all been soldiers. Oh she had _glimpsed_ others, other jewels and stars and stones bobbing around her cell, but those next four she had entered. One had been a web of threads in deep and dusty red and blue, and knotted around a bruise-purple knot of trauma. One had been as dark as soot, as glossy as the hide of a bull and shimmered with well-kept secrets. One had quaked with quicksilver fear, emerald and sage greens picking their way up like bile up a throat. The last had faded as she had watched, from the colours of a yellow-and-blue macaw to greys and whites and… nothingness. Nothing at all.

The ninth mind she had seen had been armoured, bold gold and red and a shining white light, stretching out the gold-and-red armour, extending the blinding white light to all around it. _I will protect_ , it had screamed, and then, _I will hurt_. Wanda had known, without even having to think about it, that this mind belonged to Mr. Tony Stark. When the time came later to send her scarlet snaking through its garish armour and twisting a nightmare into his mind, she was almost glad to.

The tenth mind she had seen looked like a simple home from outside, and a desecrated temple from within. Statues knocked over or shattered, paintings torn from frames, frescoes and murals splattered with blinding white paint or deep bloody red. This, she knew, was the mind of a warrior, and one who has hurt too much. She did not toy with that mind, not just then, and sent her scarlet physical to knock him down the stairs.

The eleventh mind she saw was similar to the twelfth and the thirteenth and all the way up to the twentieth. Minds she sends scarlet darting towards weaving into and out of, making them pause and reminisce and dream while her brother steals what Ultron needs and Ultron takes what vengeance he desires.

The twenty-first mind she had seen was a glowing, burgeoning storm, waiting to strike, poised for it, waiting for it, and holding back all the same. She sent her scarlet into it, watched it vanish into the deep and stormy grey of it even as she stepped away. It vanished, it was gone from sight and for a moment she thought her scarlet is not strong enough to hold the godling, just as he had claimed and – suddenly the lightning had struck in scarlet, crackling through the deep dark grey and Wanda knew she had him.

The twenty-second mind she had seen was a bleak spread of snow. It was the spy's mind, she knew, and for all the thick white blanket, the very tops of gravestones poked out on occasion, or raised mounds higher. In a few places blood spattered the ground, and holes in the snowfall were gradually filled in with more. Wanda's scarlet dug into the dips, into the graves, and hauled the woman's nightmares from her crypts.

The twenty-third mind she had seen was still and watching, poised to take a shot from his high point, and every part of it focussed down into the belly of the ship. There are feathers at the edge of it, black as a raven's but light at the edges like a falcon's. Wanda prepared to send her scarlet in to ruffle those feathers, only lose all vision, even of minds before her brother carried her away.

The twenty-fourth mind she had seen had been a forest. Winds blew through it, nervous and fluttering and uncertain and worried, and always going back to more strongly mind down a creature of green that was not of the forest. Wanda's scarlet kept the winds from holding back the beast, and made it wild with all the splinters she could summon from the breaking, whispering, forest.

Wanda sees many minds, dragged hither and thither by Ultron, and she thinks that the mind she sees in the cradle is the thirty-fifth. It is a shining orange-gold thing, bright and warm like the glowing embers of a fire, like illuminated amber, and its warmth only increases as her scarlet stretches towards it. Then she glimpses Ultron's mind within it and knows they must get out.

The thirty-sixth mind she sees is Helen Cho's and her scarlet darts through its frozen halls, melts the crystal frost that holds the doctor to Ultron's will, and Wanda finds herself very very nearly praying.

The thirty-ninth mind she sees is the android's, the being that is named the Vision by the storm-godling, and Wanda sees the gold and orange, the illuminated amber from before, and sees it warm and stretch out _interest_ as her scarlet stretches to understand it. There are databanks and neurons to it, overlying and overlapping and Wanda does not quite know what to make of a creature with so much knowledge of horror and so much will to kindness.

Wanda sees thousands of minds in Novi Grad, but does not let their wealth of worth and colour overwhelm her. She pushes her scarlet out, weaves it in and tells them, all of them _you must get out now_. It is all she can do, everything she can do, and she is barely able to analyse the minds before her scarlet is going to another and another and another weaving them in, trying to get them to safety before-

Before Novi Grad is ripped free of the ground and taken to the sky.

* * *

Wanda sees her brother's mind fade like the Macaw-Mind had, and nothing has hurt so much before. Not their parents death, not the experiments, nothing but _this_ the first mind she had ever seen, ever known, the first heartbeat she had felt beating with her own fading from bright and burning and beating blue into the blank nothingness of the powerless world.

Wanda cannot help her scream.

* * *

Wanda has lost count of the number of minds she has seen when she spots Bucky, hiding in the warehouse. The others don't quite believe her until Natasha's scouting shows evidence of a break in.

"Right," the Captain says. "And how do you know it's him?"

"Because," Wanda says, "His mind has as many holes in it as that cheese Barton likes."

"Ementhal," Barton clarifies down comms, and they can hear him smiling. "You're certain?"

" _Yes_ ," Wanda says, and Steve and Sam head in.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	23. Fic 22 - Topaz to Garnet

**Topaz to Garnet**

 **Summary:** Her scarlet is dancing around her hands, without much direction or guide, but that is how it prefers to be; its own kind of chaos. Wanda looks at the gaping hole on Vision's brow, sees the fading ruin of his mind and decides _I shall not lose this one too._

 **Notes:** Infinity War Speculation. Hints of Wanda/Vision.

 **Warnings:** Codependent Tendencies.

* * *

It is Wanda who finds Vision after the attack – the base torn open, nothing but dust where people once stood - and she is certain the only thing holding her together in all this chaos and carnage is that after all she has lost and with all her power nothing any more can touch her. Vision is crumpled, right in the epicentre, and the gem on his brow is gone.

"Vision," she breathes, for through all that has happened Vision has been the kind one, Vision got her off the rock, Vision taught her to speak again when she would rather have sunk into the ground beside her brother. Even in their war, on opposite sides, he had not targeted her, had not taunted her loss. He _understood_ , in some impossible way, and offered kindness freely.

Wanda kneels beside his prone form, and wonders if that is how she had looked when he had found her after Novi Grad. Crumpled, smaller than life, and not entirely there. She brushes the thought aside.

"Vision," she repeats and reaches towards him, tries to find that half-pulse of his she _knows_ must be there, for the not-blood coagulating but still flowing at his brow to be behaving as it is. She presses two fingers to his brow, gentle as she dares and either side of the gaping wound where the golden stone usually rests. _Vision?_ She calls, and she is within his mind. The ordered orange is chaos, the green and magenta neurons are fading, and the bright yellow-gold that has been there since his first moments is _gone_.

Her scarlet is dancing around her hands, without much direction or guide, but that is how it prefers to be; its own kind of chaos. Wanda looks at the gaping hole on Vision's brow, sees the fading ruin of his mind and decides _I shall not lose this one too._

Scarlet lashes out and binds together. Red and crimson, burgundy and blood, vermillion and cerise, all the shades of red she can think of and find within herself pour out her hands. _Mind Magic,_ she thinks. _Whatever it is that gives me minds, come out._

It comes pouring out of her hands in a gushing torrent, red and red and _red_ , and twists together into a crimson so intense it looks solid.

Then it falls into her palms and Wanda knows it is.

She rolls it in her fingers, and feels nothing of it but a slight warmth, and the nature of her own gifts. It is not an Infinity Stone, it is not the Mind Gem, but it is _of the mind_ , and Wanda presses it to the gaping hole in Vision's brow, and for the first time since she was ten she _prays_.

Hebrew comes, where she thought she had forgotten, and in the cathedral of her mind, she can see the façade walls flickering, the synagogue coming through. _Please_ , she thinks and she is not sure if it is Sokovian or Hebrew or English she uses. _I cannot lose another._

And like a miracle, Vision's mind brightens.

* * *

"What did you do?" Natasha asks later, and Wanda shrugs. They are waiting for Sam, and possibly Clint – he said he might show – and Vision is sitting a little ways a way, fingers gently massaging the skin around the deep red gem Wanda made.

"I…," Wanda doesn't know how to explain. "I couldn't lose him too," she decides on. "I made my gifts make a gem and I hoped it would be enough." There is silence and Wanda thinks Natasha may be shocked. "I _prayed_ ," she says, and lets her tone tell Natasha how long it has been since she has done so with any real earnestness.

"I think," Natasha says, voice soft, "You may have saved his life."

Wanda shrugs. "He's been kind to me since… since Novi Grad. After…," she sighs and changes tack. "I cannot lose any more people I care about. My brother was _half of me_. There would not be enough of me left if I lost more."

Wanda does not quite know what to make of Natasha's expression after that, and goes to sit with Vision.

* * *

Wanda's fingertips are gentle, skimming around the red stone that now fills in Vision's brow. The stone is smooth, and does not spark towards her gifts as the Infinity Stone had, but it is warm, and it is maintaining Vision well enough. She brushes her thumb over the garnet of it.

"Does it hurt?" She has lapsed to Sokovian, as she tends to with Vision, able as he is to speak the language back.

"Dully," Vision says, "Not nearly as much as it did when it was taken." His hands gently touch Wanda's elbow, and Wanda's hands withdraw. "Thank you," he says, and it is with all the earnestness of his nature. "Truly, thank you. You saved my life."

Wanda shrugs. "You saved mine," she says. "At Novi Grad, you saved mine. I do not wish to lose those I care about again."

They are silent for a while, Vision's hand still gentle on her arm. She does not mind his touch. It is not like the others, from whom she will still flinch away, it is not even like Pietro whose mere presence had been a comfort. It was grounding, however, and Wanda appreciated that now, when the lack of her hurtling brother made her feel like she was hurtling through time and space herself.

"Your gifts," Vision says, his voice still soft. "Are they…?"

Wanda smiles, just a touch, lets her fingers slip to take Vision's hand. "They are fine," she says. "I can see your mind, as well as it can be, considering. It is what stopped my worry."

Vision's hand is cool with the vibranium in his cells, but it does not stop Wanda from feeling warm when he squeezes her hand.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	24. Fic 23 - The Progression of Love

**The Progression of Love**

 **Summary:** They do not question how they are, they never have, and their love grows between them like blooming flowers.

 **Notes:** I don't ship Maxicest, personally, but I can see how it might happen. Like _Blue Into Scarlet, Scarlet Into Blue_ this is me figuring out a way they could go from their codependency to an actual relationship.

 **Warnings:** Codependency, Incest.

* * *

 **i.  
** The first time they kiss it is after a protest. The air had been singing around them, with the anger and frustration and fury of the people of Novi Grad, and joining in they had felt it fill them like life, like a charge of energy, like they were _more_ than simply angry children. It made them feel _right_ .

They are still giddy with it, walking home, when Wanda kisses Pietro.

It is only for a moment, the brief press of her lips against his, before her eyes widen with the realisation, and they continue on like normal.

* * *

 **ii.**  
The second time, Wanda was threatened. Pietro has always hated shortcuts as much as he loves them, willing to take them himself, but always wary when Wanda was with him too. Because he was wary he spotted the thugs, and had the presence of mind to pick their pockets as they drew near.

Then one threatens Wanda and Pietro's punch comes flying out from nowhere.

Wanda knows her brother's protectiveness, knows that he will hurt anyone who touches her without permission, but is still surprised when, shaking his fist out, he turns and cups her face.

"Oh, Wanda," he says, and it sounds almost like a prayer before he kisses her.

Wanda finds herself kissing back, just briefly before Pietro draws back, bows his brow to hers. "I'm sorry," he breathes out, soft as snow against her lips, and takes her hand.

Like the first kiss they do not mention it.

* * *

 **iii.**  
The third time there is a nightmare, and Wanda wakes gasping. Pietro, always a light sleeper where his sister is concerned, hears her gasps, feels her hand clenching in his shirt where he curls beside her in the ruin, sharing his heat with her.

"Wanda?" he asks, and is crushed to her, her face burrowing into his neck.

"I love you," she murmurs. "I love you, I love you, I love you, you're alive, you're alive."

"I'm alive," he promises. "I love you. You're safe." He presses a kiss to her hair, waits for her pulse to slow, her breathing to ease, for Wanda to calm.

It does not hit him she thought him dead, indeed he does not realise he is still assuming it to be the usual nightmare they share, of when their parents died but simply being without the other until Wanda whispers, "I dreamed you were _dead_."

They are not sure which of them kissed first that time, only that when they fall asleep they are tangled together, and Pietro keeps nuzzling at Wanda's forehead.

* * *

 **iv.**  
They never question their growing closeness. Wanda's not sure if it's because they never bring it up, or because they never see a reason to bring it up. They have always been half of each other, always loved each other, Pietro has always been protective of Wanda.

They do not really notice it growing to more.

* * *

 **v.  
** They have sex exactly twice. The first time is unplanned, kissing becoming more, both of them twisting closer, nuzzling and sucking at the sensitive skin of one another's necks, feeling one another so wholly they feel as though they truly are one being, rather than just halves of a whole.

Afterwards Wanda nuzzles close, lips pressed lightly to her brother's arm.

"This was a mistake," she says, and Pietro almost flinches. "Not like that. I love you, you know that. But there are too many risks to this. We can be close and people will not care too much so long as we are not fucking. We can be close and not risk the potential of a child. We should not do this again."

Pietro does not need to speak to let Wanda know he understands, and he pulls the blankets closer around them both.

* * *

 **vi.**  
The second time there is a nightmare trapped in Wanda's mind and Pietro can feel it. They have been careful with their closeness during the experiments, careful not to show Strucker and List just how much they mean to each other, but Pietro is not always sure they succeed.

He knows they did not succeed when he is taken to Wanda, taken to _see_ her after so long kept separate, and she is pale and shaking on her bed.

 _Wanda?_ stretches towards her mind even as his hand gently touches her arm. He glares at the techs and the medics, and even at the soldiers who took him here, and watches them file out of the room. He clambers onto the bed beside her and holds his sister close.

* * *

 **vii.**  
 _Look_ , she sends, and shows him the nightmare. It is a bruise in colour and it is not hers, some fragment of thought taken from another mind, and Pietro sends his silver winds to try to take it away from his sisters scarlet.

 _Give it to me_ , he says. _Let me bear it for you._

Wanda shakes her head, presses a kiss to Pietro's neck. _Together_ , she says. _Together._

To Pietro there is no question as they twist together, their minds warp into one, and the nightmare divided between the two minds of their one soul.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	25. Fic 24 - Mine, My Soul

**Mine, My Soul**

 **Summary:** How does Tahiti sound this time of year?

 **Notes:** Fix-it Fic.

 **Warnings:** Codependency,

* * *

The way Wanda slept, Vision thought, revealed much about how alone she felt. Those first days after the battle, her brother dead, she had curled small on the hospital bed, on one side, her lower arm curling around her breast and stomach to rest on her hip, her lower arm curled down, her knuckles knotted in her hair. She curled as though she had expected her brother to arrive and curl behind her, Vision thinks. To press a kiss to her knuckles buried in her hair, to take her hand resting on her hip, to make her feel safe.

Her brother never comes. Her brother is dead.

After a few days she curls smaller, into a ball, and Vision can barely see even her hair poking out from under the sheets. It worries him, deeply, how much her brother's death has hurt her.

* * *

When Wanda is offered the chance to train she takes it with both hands. Vision thinks she has been left too alone since Novi Grad, with little to do but better learn English and offer help to those refugees still unsettled. Training gives her purpose, and though she seems twitchy she catches up to the others with a rapidity that Vision thinks speaks of how deeply she is trying to bury her grief.

* * *

Wanda is sat on the Quinjet in her uniform, muttering in a language the rest of the team does not understand. "Wanda?" Steve asks. "Wanda, did you hear the briefing?" Wanda nods, but does not look up. She keeps muttering, hands clenching and unclenching, scarlet flickering out between her fingers for brief moments before her control solidifies and pulls it back in.

"Wanda, what are you doing?" It's Rhodey who asks this time, crouched before her as best he can be in the armour. "If you don't want to fight you don't have to." Wanda glances up, glares, and keeps muttering.

"She's counting," Vision says. "Backwards from one hundred in Sokovian." His hand rests lightly on her back, gently rubbing between her shoulderblades. There are glances between the rest of the team, even as Steve and Natasha set up the jet to go.

"Why-"

"Because," Sam says, before Vision can speak, "the rest of you have clearly forgotten what happened in her last fight."

For a moment Wanda's shoulders hunch in and her counting stutters before she resumes. Vision's thumb presses gently against her shoulder, offering comfort. "I'm sorry," Sam offers. Wanda shakes her head, and continues counting.

When she finishes her eyes are glowing crimson, and her scarlet dances around her hands in perfectly contained orbs.

* * *

Pietro wakes in a room far from anyone and, most importantly, far from Wanda's mind. He remembers being shot, remembers _dying_ and cannot believe his sister would not be here if she knew.

Ergo, she does not know. Ergo, this is secret.

(It never crosses his mind that she might be dead. He would _know_ if she was dead.)

He looks around, recognising the S.H.I.E.L.D. crest on the wall. He clenches muscles and unclenches them, checks that all is as it should be, and that all is working. His ribs twinge slightly, but he has run with worse.

His punch cracks a brick when he finds the door is locked.

* * *

It is Fury who walks in, carrying a tray, when someone finally opens the door. "Good to see you awake Mr. Maximoff. We weren't sure you'd make it."

"Where," Pietro says, and it is gritted out in the English it takes him focus to speak in given his anger. "Where is my sister?"

"Out," Fury says, almost cheerfully. "On a job. She's fitted in quite well with our team, trains twice as hard as any of them except the android."

"Let me join her," Pietro says, and it is an order and a request. "Take me to her now."

"We can't do that," Fury says, and sets down the tray. "We need to run some tests on you first, make sure you aren't going to risk going batshit. Cradle fixed you up, T.A.H.I.T.I. brought you back, but the last person we resurrected very nearly went completely crazy." Fury smiles slightly at Pietro's expression, and pushes the tray towards him. "Try the soup," he says. "I hear it's lovely."

* * *

Pietro does not try the soup, mostly out of spite. He does, however, wolf down the bread – too sweet as most American foods generally were implied to be – and down the orange juice. He pokes at the rest of the food on the tray with one finger, but has no idea what half of it is meant to be.

"Not hungry?" Fury asks from where he's sat on a chair, and Pietro shrugs. "The doctors think you should eat more, what with your metabolism."

"I think I know when I am hungry better than they do."

Fury shrugs this time, and lifts one leg, propping his ankle over his knee. "We're going to have to run some checks. Make sure you're alright."

"I'm fine," Pietro says. "And you're going to have to let me see my sister."

"We will," Fury says, head nodding slightly. "We just have to know you won't go mad and try to hurt her."

There is a very slight _crack_ heard in the room as another brick is broken by Pietro's speed-enhanced punch. "I would _never_ ," he says, and he is biting out the words again, "Hurt Wanda."

Pietro doesn't like the calm Fury still has as he goes, "Not intentionally, I'm sure."

* * *

Wanda feels something is off when she steps back onto base, and it is not her twisted ankle. There is a new mind in the humming glowing jewels she can sense, one brighter than the others, faster than them, hidden away amongst them all. Wanda can tell when there are new agents, new engineers, new _people_ on base, but this mind… this mind they are trying to hide and that worries her.

"There is someone," she murmurs to Vision. "I can feel a new mind in it all, but they are hidden."

Vision only nods, and goes to tell the Captain.

* * *

It is the Captain who tells her a few minutes later, sat in the debriefing room. Debrief was done in a matter of moments, and now Steve sits at the head of the table beside Natasha, tablet in front of him, fingers tapping gently on the steel table.

"First," he says, and his voice is ringing with the sincerity that has encouraged Wanda to trust him since Novi Grad. "I want it known I did not agree with this. If I'd had my way this would not have happened, and your brother would be buried and resting in peace." Wanda sees the words, blood on snow, rising from Natasha's mind. _Requiescat in Pace_. Then the words _your brother_ register and scarlet blooms in her eyes.

"What," she says, "Did you do?"

"Fury," Steve says, and taps the tablet, slides it past Vision, to Wanda. Wanda reads the report, sees the readouts. "Fury overruled us. He said they had a program, intended to bring back fallen Avengers."

Wanda cannot speak, her mind stuttering around the idea, she barely even notices Vision's hand pressed to her back, rubbing gentle soothing circles. "When?" is all she manages.

"Today," Steve says. "He woke up about an hour ago."

* * *

Wanda looks through the glass and sees her brother and for her, time stops. He is there, racing around the room, occasionally punching bricks to breaking because like her he hates being confined after the building collapse, but time slows as it does when he runs with her in his arms, everything crystal clear, and she sees his every step.

Her scarlet swirls around her hands, twists, rises, she can feel it in her eyes, the warm red wave of it, feels the moment her mind links to his and-

 _Pietro?_

For Pietro time halts too. There is no question this is Wanda's mind, no question at all, the black stone of the cathedral façade, the gilding, the touches of deep brown and through it all the scarlet, her scarlet, rising and swirling like a wave of love and warmth and anger. _Wanda_ , rises out of his mind in glorious shimmering silver.

* * *

They stand, pressed together, brow to brow, hands cupping faces, Wanda's smile peaceful, Pietro's almost adoring, murmuring to each other in hushed and hurried Sokovian. "Anyone able to translate?" Natasha asks from the observation room.

"I would," Vision says, "But they are speaking their native language for privacy, as none of you can speak it. It would be rather rude."

It is Fury who speaks next. "As that may be," he says and gestures towards the twins, "We need to know if they plan to leave."

"Oh," Vision says, and his expression seems almost embarrassed. "No, they are not talking about that."

Stark tch's between his teeth, and lightly elbows Steve. "What did I tell you," he says. " _Flowers in the Attic_."

"Not everyone's seen that film, Stark," says Natasha.

"And even if they have," Vision says, "It's the wrong comparison to draw."

* * *

"You're well," Wanda breathes. "You're _healed_."

Pietro's knuckles graze softly down Wanda's cheekbone. "You're safe?" he asks. "You're alright, training isn't hurting you, you weren't hurt in the fight?"

"I'm fine," she promises. "I trained so hard I was too tired even for our nightmares."

Pietro smiles just slightly, "That explains why I had none."

"Too tired?" Wanda asks, tone almost teasing, "Or because my mind wasn't calling them up for us?"

Pietro plants a kiss firmly on her brow before resting his brow against hers again. "Both," he says. "Both too tired, so neither of us called them up, so neither of us was influenced by the other." He sounds teasing and proud at once, and Wanda takes his hands where they still cup her face.

"You're alive," she says, as though she still cannot quite believe it. A sob catches in her throat, and Pietro can see tears beading in her eyes. "You're _alive_. Maybe there is a God after all."

It is the same instincts as ever that tell him to pull her to him, hug her, and rock them gently from side to side as she cries.

"You are my soul," he murmurs to her, as quiet and as fast as he can, and sends the words to her mind as well. "While you live, so too will I."

Wanda presses closer to him, sobs harder, and it is all Pietro can do not to try to flee the room with her, to take them some place outside where Wanda can breathe without feeling the walls pressing in like a tomb.

"Why," she says, "Why didn't you carry them both? You're strong enough, fast enough, why didn't you get all three of you clear?"

Pietro can feel the emptiness of the question – there is no blame there, only blinding grief shining out like stretching shadows from Wanda's scarlet mind – and strokes her hair, rocks them gently from side to side. "You know why," he says. "I will only ever carry you. I will push people, shove people, move them bodily out of the way, but I will only ever carry you."

Wanda's head shakes against his chest. "You've been carrying me our whole lives," she mumbles, choked through tears. "Do you know what it did to me, without you there?"

"I can see," Pietro says, as the memories – red raging, scarlet savage, crimson claws, all aspects of her gifts made weapons as sensitive as the whiskers of a cat – come rising to the fore. "I can see." He presses a kiss to her hair again, strokes a hand down her back, feels her sobs start to ease. "I'm so sorry, Wanda."

He can see it in her mind, the question hovering in red and gold and deep dark black, _What would I do if you were gone forever?_ Pietro holds her close and strokes her hair.

"You will never be without me again," he promises, the promise he had been making every day since their parents died. "You will never have to be alone." He presses a kiss to her hair, completes the promise with the whispered words Wanda has always told him to move beyond. "Everything I am is yours."

* * *

"You experimented on him," Wanda says and her tone is flat and furious. "You took him from me, you would not let me bury him and you _experimented on him!_ " Scarlet is lashing around her great vines of it a richer red than Vision has ever yet seen from Wanda, and it claws cruel lines down the walls. Her English is almost perfect now, usually, but with her anger her accent returns, pulling hard consonants and contrasts and making her seem angrier still.

"We brought him back for you." Fury is calm, one hand in his pocket.

"For me." Her voice is flat, even the lilt of her Sokovian accent does not remove that. "If you were bringing my brother back to life for me _you could have told me_. You could have _asked_. Did you not think, that I would agree? Did you think it was better to take him from me, forbid me from seeing him, forbid me from _burying_ him and _experiment on my dead brother?"_

Wanda is shouting, shouting so loudly that Pietro in the next room can hear. _Wanda?_ He sends, and is met by a violently warm wave of red affection. Wanda curls her fingers slowly in, pulls her scarlet towards herself so none seeps from her fingers and all glows from her eyes.

"We were born Jewish," she says, and the calm in her voice is eerie. "We do not believe any longer. We have not believed since we were ten, but that is not the _point_. We have already been experimented on by what we later knew to be HYDRA – Nazis." She takes in a deep breath, and scarlet begins to seep out from her fingers, wrapping around her hands into the twisting, warping scarlet spheres of violence. "What," she says, and takes a single step towards Nick Fury, "Made you think it was acceptable to experiment on us as well?"

* * *

Fury did not apologise, and Wanda did not expect him to. The consideration that they might not have wanted to be experimented on further ranked lower than the importance of maintaining a useful asset, and Fury had all of S.H.I.E.L.D. to think of, not just individuals.

 _He still shouldn't have_ , Wanda thinks, and relaxes as she feels Pietro's chuckle bubbling up.

"I'm glad he did," Pietro says, his arms still wrapped loosely around her. "I get to see you again."

Wanda cannot help her smile. "That is true," she says, but cannot agree further.

"He should have asked," Pietro acknowledges. "But," and Wanda can already see the forming shape of her brother's teasing humour. "We can make him _ask_ us for help forever now. He owes that at least."

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


	26. Fic 25 - Prompt: Stubbornness

**Prompt: Stubbornness**

 **Summary:** Wanda punches his shoulder and he is half-certain she has used her scarlet to add to the force of it as he stumbles back. "You _idiot!"_ she says, in Sokovian, and it is not quite a scream apart from the anger curling out in scarlet around her face. "Why would you do that? _How_ could you do that? You could have healed _wrong!"_

 **Notes:** Pietro Lives AU

 **Warnings:** Codependency.

* * *

 **i.**  
Wanda does not notice her brother's leg at first, because the pain, while there, is enough for Pietro to ignore, and therefore not where she would notice it in his mind. He limps, on occasion, but is quick enough to hide it or cover for it, or simply claim he slipped.

(He almost never slips, but after the Battle he had been quaking all over the place, and Wanda was not surprised that he was clumsy.)

It turns out, Wanda learns, to have begun almost a week ago.

* * *

 **ii.**  
Pietro does not particularly like the Avengers. Some of them are alright - the guy with the bow is fun to tease, but he's not always around, and the guy with a shield is pretty decent but also too serious - but the one in armour reminds him too much of Stark, and the Vision is simply _inhuman_.

Still, he is not inclined to take an insult lying down, and being called old for his limp, even in jest, leads to a middle finger waved in their general direction while he gets used to feet again.

(He had spent several minutes dead and several hours in a Cradle after all. Captain Rogers called it Sea-Legs.)

" _Ooold_ ," Clint calls from the doorway, and only grins at Pietro's gesture. "You're even going grey!"

"Fuck you!" Pietro calls, "You try walking when you died!"

Then he careens into a wall so hard he almost dislocates his hip.

* * *

 **iii.**  
Pietro assures them all that he's fine - he is, for the most part, and where he isn't he'll heal in a matter of hours anyway - and goes to sit with Wanda.

It's easy to be still with his sister, not least because her scarlet can twist into his mind and around his legs and _make sure_ he doesn't go speeding off without meaning to. He is always grateful for that, that it takes only a twisted fingertip from Wanda for his shakes to still, for him to be calm long enough to regain what control he had lost in healing. His hip still aches, but it's a dull ache and when Wanda asks he promises it will be fine.

* * *

 **iv.**  
"Want to run?" Clint asks, a few days later, and Pietro's not sure why his hip is still not entirely healed and is dying to be allowed to sprint. Pietro is up and standing by the door in the time it takes Clint to blink.

"Old man," he says, and grins before sprinting outside.

The air outside is fresh and clean and though its not exactly the same as the crisp pine of the woods outside the castle it is recognisably _free_ and Pietro rocks from side to side stretching while he waits for Clint to catch up. His hip twinges, and when he touches his leg he can just about feel the slow-healing scar beneath his tracksuit. Maybe, he thinks, he had needed more time in the Cradle, but he had been going _mad_ cooped up in the coffin-like thing.

Claustrophobia is to be expected when you've had a building collapse on you.

"Alright?" Clint calls, jogging over, bow in hand.

"Leg," Pietro says. "'s healing slower than it should."

Clint frowns. "Do you usually heal as fast as you run?"

"About," Pietro says, and shifts his feet. "Race?"

Clint laughs. "You'd beat me. No. Potshots?"

Pietro looks at the bow disbelievingly. "With that?"

"Won't know if we don't try," Clint says, grinning, and lifts it, drawing the string back. "Go on."

Pietro _runs_.

* * *

 **v.**  
His limp does slow him, somewhat, he has to be careful where he puts his foot, and takes to leaping from his toes to land on his uninjured leg, altering his stride to something momentarily baffling. He almost collides with a tree, and then found his balance. The world was speeding by, his leg aching but only slightly and - _arrow._

Pietro swings his head back, catches the arrow, sees the explosive tip and throws it back towards Clint.

"Cheat!" he calls, but he knows he is going too fast to be heard. Times like this he wishes Wanda was around, able to send scarlet messages between minds, but she probably wouldn't approve of him running with a limp.

* * *

 **vi.**  
Wanda most certainly would not have approved, had she known, but at that moment she was sitting with Vision, taking advantage of the android's patience and fluency with languages to improve her English. Sometimes, though, learning would pause, such as now.

"Your brother," Vision says, and Wanda is ready for the various things she has already heard from the other Avengers (Tony's _Flowers in the Attic_ comment was the least of them). "Are you sure he is well enough to train?"

Wanda relaxes and shrugs. "He says he is," she says. "And he knows I would be disappointed if he lied."

"And - forgive me - but your disappointment would be enough to stop him?"

Wanda knows that, from anyone else, this would be a pointed remark, a question of their bond, a judgement, but from Vision it is simply a question. "There are a few things," Wanda says, "Pietro will never do. Hurting me is one of them."

Vision looks like he might say something else - for a moment she can see the word _thoughtless_ floating through the banks of neurons that make up his mind alongside an image of her brother - but he simply smiles slightly and nods. "Shall we continue?"

* * *

 **vii.**  
Training, Pietro thinks, went pretty well. Even with Clint's potshots he'd found his stride again, and dodging the arrows or catching them had provided an extra challenge. His hip aches, and he considers getting an aspirin or a compress but settles for finding Wanda, and sitting quietly by, eyes half closed, as she practices English with the android.

* * *

 **viii.**  
It is not until a skirmish with HYDRA-Police, a week later, that Wanda finds out. She knows that Pietro had been training, only resting when asleep or when sitting with her, knows about the potshot runs, about Rogers testing Pietro's ability to predict movements with random hurling of his shield, Natasha testing his ability to climb and sneak even at high speed.

She did not know about the limp until a bullet rips through Pietro's thigh and all she sees is red.

"Well," Clint says later as they're patching up her brother. "You'll limp with both legs now - balanced, eh?"

Pietro's eyes dart to hers, and Wanda knows hers are filling with scarlet. "What," she says, slowly and in Sokovian, "does he mean?" Pietro looks sheepish and Wanda lets scarlet curl around her fingers, rise and climb its way up her arms. "Do not make me go into your mind."

"My leg," Pietro says, in English, and taps at his off leg. "It is healing slowly."

Wanda summons up her English. "I would like," she says, and tries to pull her scarlet back, "to speak with my brother alone."

* * *

 **ix.**  
Wanda punches his shoulder and he is half-certain she has used her scarlet to add to the force of it as he stumbles back into the bed he was supposed to still be sitting on. "You _idiot!_ " she says, in Sokovian, and it is not quite a scream apart from the anger curling out in scarlet around her face. "Why would you do that? _How_ could you do that? You could have healed _wrong!"_

There, Pietro has to admit, Wanda may have a point.

"You need your legs to run, why would you damage one by not letting it heal? What were you thinking?!"

Pietro has to admit that he may not have been thinking.

Wanda sighs, scrubs a hand over her face. "What were you thinking?" she asks again, and Pietro has to tug his fingers back from tugging at the rapidly-healing new bullet hole in his thigh. That, at least, is healing at his usual accelerated rate.

"I wasn't," he admits, using Sokovian to try to soothe Wanda. "I was just sick of being cooped up."

Wanda's face rests on her hand, her elbow in her other hand, arm braced across her stomach. "Why didn't you _tell_ me? Or Doctor Cho? Or _anyone_?"

Pietro looks sheepish again. He doesn't really have a reason, beyond thoughtlessness, and evidently Wanda picks up on that thought because she is huffing out a breath as he thinks it.

"Vision was right," she says. "You really are thoughtless, sometimes."

"Hey-" Pietro starts.

"Vision was right, and he is barely a _month old_."

Again, Pietro has to admit his sister may have a point.

Wanda finally sits, right beside the bed Pietro has been forced to take and grasps his hand. Her knuckles are pale even through the scarlet dancing around them, even in the glowing light from her eyes. "Promise me," she says, voice soft. "Promise me you will _tell me_ if you are hurt again." Her thumb grazes over his knuckles. "You always know when I am hurt, but you bury yours. _Tell me_ ," she repeats, and Pietro lifts their joined hands and kisses her knuckles.

"I promise," he says, and lets a smile curl the edges of his lips. "But only if you stop dancing around the android. You don't have to use English as an excuse, and soon it will be a poor one."

Wanda slaps his arm at that, but she is smiling and Pietro considers that a win.

* * *

 **End Notes:** Reviews are much appreciated!


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